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

open by something that
knew what it was doing,” said Charlie, without even looking at me. He stared at
the body in front of him without emotion, as though the tragedy of what this
teenager represented couldn’t touch him. He could have been looking at an ant
farm for all the effect it had on him.
     
    “The cuts are sharp and there aren’t
many,” he continued, “Implying accuracy. The stomach, liver, bladder, kidneys
and spleen have been removed. Pretty much like the other bodies, give or take
an organ or two.”
     
    “Can I see it?” said a voice.
     
    I snapped my eyes to the corner of
the room. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed him earlier. In the corner, sat
on a plastic chair with his feet swinging an inch above the floor, was Ben. A
dark shadow covered him.
     
    “What’s he doing here?” I said.
     
    Lately, I had tried my best to watch
over Ben. It was the least I owed him; after all, I had killed his father. The
fact that his dad was a cannibalistic hunter who had tried to murder me didn’t
matter, because I had left Ben without a dad. Later his mum, Alice, had been
ripped apart by infected in an attack at Bleakholt.
     
    Sometimes, lying on my sleeping bag
with the moon casting glows on my tent, I would think about that night. Even
now I could still hear the groans of the infected and their hungry cries as they
moved towards us. I heard the soft thud as knives sunk into dead flesh. I heard
the ripping and tearing as four of them dragged Alice to the ground and made a
meal of her meat and skin. I could still smell the blood, still hear her
screams.
     
    Ben played with something in his
hands. When I looked closer, I saw that he was toying with a bead necklace.
     
    “Where did you get that?” I said.
     
    Ben ignored me. He stood up off the
chair and looked at Charlie. It amazed me how much the nine year old had grown
over the last year, despite a diet that many would say was lacking.
     
    “Can I see the body Charlie?” he
said.
     
    “You know you can’t, buddy,” said the
scientist.
     
    Ben’s shoulders slumped. He sat back
down in the chair and twisted the beads along his fingers. The scientist and
the boy seemed to have a bond between them. I felt a twinge of guilt flash
through my mind. Since Alice had died, I had tried to spend time with Ben, but
I just had too much to do around camp. I felt like I was on a rack getting my
arms and legs stretched, and soon they would just pop out of their sockets and
disconnect from my body. Every time I got something done the ropes slackened,
but then somebody else stepped up and made them taut again.
     
    I walked over to Charlie and stood a
foot away from the work bench. I tried not to look at Reggie’s son’s face,
instead focussing on Charlie. Sweat covered his forehead. When he moved he
still looked awkward, and it seemed that even so much later he still hadn’t
gotten used to having one arm. I felt like he blamed me sometimes. He had a
point in a way, since I was the one who cut his arm off after all. I had done
it to save him, because he had been bitten and without my intervention he would
have been a corpse long ago.
     
    “I don’t want Ben watching this kind
of stuff,” I said.
     
    “The boy’s lonely.”
     
    “Still. He shouldn’t be here,
Charlie.”
     
    “You sound like Alice.”
     
    He was right. Ben’s mum had always
been fiercely protective of her son. I used to think that we shouldn't shield
children away from the grim realities of the world we had found ourselves in.
That had been easy to say before I was responsible for one. Since Ben became my
problem – not problem, responsibility – my view was starting to change. The
body in front of us was pale and stained with blood, his chest carved open at a
sickening angle. It was something no boy should see.
     
    “So what do you think?” I said,
nodding at the teenager on the table.
     
    Charlie put his knife on the surface
of the table. Coagulated blood stained