Sick Bastards by Matt Shaw Page B

for him. I wanted to ask him whether he was okay but didn’t bother. It was a stupid question. Of course he wasn’t okay. He had woken up, in a strange place, and discovered his world had more or less ended. Suddenly it dawned on me that I might have had some good news to share with him.
     
    “Planes!” I blurted out. “Occasionally, back at the house, we see planes flying overhead.”
     
    The man looked at me blankly.
     
    “It means we aren’t the only ones alive. There are more survivors. My father thinks they’re military. He says they’ll be looking for people like us and that they probably have somewhere safe to take us. That’s something, right?”
     
    The man didn’t look as impressed (or hopeful) as I had hoped he would.
     
    “They’re up there and we’re down here. It’s a lot of ground to cover and I doubt they can even see us from up in the skies,” he said.
     
    I didn’t let his words bring me down. I’d rather have a little hope than no hope.
     
    “My father said that if we’re to survive, we need to remain optimistic.”
     
    The man didn’t respond. I could tell by his face he had lost all hope already. We continued the rest of the walk in silence with only the noises of our footsteps crunching on the woodland debris underfoot to break the uncomfortable atmosphere.
     
    * * * * *
     
    By the time we reached the house I couldn’t help but think I had made a mistake. The man’s silence was uncomfortable and made me feel nervous. At first I thought he was a victim but now I had the unpleasant feeling he was nothing more than a looter; someone who was out to take what he could get in this shitty world.
     
    I stepped up onto the porch, by the front door. The man waited on the drive a step or two behind me. He looked apprehensive too. I raised my hand to knock on the door but it swung open before I had the chance to do so. Father was standing there. Mother and Sister were behind him - watching from further down the hallway.
     
    Mother and Sister looked relieved to see me but Father - he wasn’t even looking at me. I was invisible to him. His eyes were transfixed on the man standing behind me.
     
    “So...” he said.
     
    His voice was quiet. I hadn’t seen him like this before.
     
    “Did you return as the hero? Some food for us? Some help? Or did you return with your tail between your legs and another mouth to feed?”
     
    I couldn’t help but feel it was a rhetorical question.
     
    “Who’s your friend?” he asked.
     
    With no words (or warning) I spun round on the spot, with the axe in hand, and struck the stranger’s neck with so much force that his head separated clean from his body. The body just stood there for a moment with a fine jet of red mist spurting from the stump painting the blue skies (and then splattering the floor). After a couple of seconds the body then slumped to the floor in a crumpled heap.
     
    Father jumped.
     
    The girls screamed.
     
    The severed head rolled to a standstill.
     
    “What the hell are you doing?” Father shouted.
     
    He stepped from the house and closed the door behind him to stop Mother and Sister seeing anymore than what they had to - even though we both knew they had already seen more than they needed to.
     
    Father snatched the axe from my hand and asked me again, “What the hell are you doing?”
     
    “There’s nothing out there!” I told him. “Nothing but those things and whoever this was...I bumped into him in the middle of the woods. He told me he had seen those infected people too. He said there was a lot of them and not a lot of anything else...”
     
    “So you killed him?” Father hissed.
     
    “He was going to come this way with or without me!” I said. In truth, I hadn’t planned to kill the man. It was only because of the change in his personality that I realised he couldn’t be trusted. Too unpredictable. Too dangerous. I couldn’t shake the thought from my mind of the man being a looter; the worry