CHAPTER FOUR
Back in the Hunter Tower, Bach laid Wisteria down on his bed. How was it that he knew her? He grimaced.
Felip entered. He looked better, but still pale. “Explain this to me. If she is from the settlement near Norton, why did you not take her there?”
Bach didn’t answer. He didn’t want to get into an argument with him about Wisteria, because Felip was still weak. How could he explain when he couldn’t even understand it himself?
“So, you have changed your mind about Terrans?” Felip asked.
“Wisteria got hurt and I…”
“You know her?” Felip looked shocked.
“Yes, but I have never met her before and she has not spoken since she fell.” Bach knew he sounded crazy. “But I know she is called Wisteria.”
“Could it be from your time at RZC?”
Squinting, he shook his head. He remembered every face and every name of the beasts from his months in RZC’s care, and she wasn’t one of them. “Wisteria was not there,”
“And you call her by her name. Interesting, since you have never referred to any Terran by their name. You call Piper Enric’s Terran. You do not believe in the naming of animals, remember?”
“I am just as confused as you are.”
“And she is not your Thayn?” Felip asked.
He shook his head.
“I guess you should talk to Enric. He might have ideas why you—”
“No, do not discuss this with Enric,” Bach interjected.
“You know that he will think she is here for him. He asked you for another Thayn and three days later? Here she is.”
Enric appeared in hall outside Bach’s room. He was followed by a redheaded Terran girl.
She stood timidly behind him with a red bruise on her cheek. She was bleeding a little.
“What happened to your Terran?” Bach asked.
“I do not know.” Enric inspected her cheek. “Piper, what happened?”
The girl shook her head.
“It is not important. Piper tells me you brought a stray home?”
Bach looked over at Piper who was hidden behind Enric.
“You do not have to beat the girl.” Felip looked concerned as he moved toward her. “Are you all right?”
“Don’t touch me,” Piper hissed.
“Whoa,” Enric exclaimed angrily. “Piper, you do not ever—ever talk to him like that, you Terran rat!”
“She was only acting out of loyalty to you,” Felip angrily defended her, as she crawled away from him. “Piper, I am not going to hurt you.”
“Please stay away,” the girl whimpered like a wounded dog.
“Leave her.” Enric grabbed Felip’s arm. “She has to learn how to behave.”
“Enric, this is why Bach will not renew anyone for you.” Felip sounded annoyed.
“Because of a little blood? Please, she will clean it up when she is done sulking!” Enric laughed. “Now get away from her.”
Felip ignored him and tried to comfort Enric’s Terran.
“No!” She scurried away from Felip. “Stay away from me.”
Felip looked upset. “Bach, he is torturing this girl. Renew her, so you can control her and stop this—”
“Never,” Bach stated. The concept of having a Terran as close to him as Piper was to Enric revolted him.
“Then get Enric to free her mind,” Felip pleaded.
“That’s impossible. Undoing the renewal will make her insane,” Bach reminded him. “But Enric, right now, I would be happy if you treated her better.”
“She is a Terran, dirt girl, and practically a virus. How am I supposed to treat her?” Enric glanced at Piper who sat at his feet. “Piper, leave us.”
The girl nodded and scurried out of the room.
“You are going to kill her one day, Enric!” Felip exclaimed.
Enric gave him a cold smile. “I want to talk to the Sen-Son. This is a private conversation and you have to leave.”
Felip’s pale face became red.
“Give us a moment please,” Bach said to Felip.
Felip nodded and left.
“If this is supposed to be a lesson you are teaching me about taking care of Thayn, before you renew the new one, then I promise I will not hurt her.” Enric grunted. “But I would prefer you did not use Felip to teach me.”
“Felip is sick from his journey home and he needs to recuperate. The longer he is ill, the longer you will have to do his tasks,” Bach pointed out.
Though Enric was a dear friend, he was extremely lazy.
“It upsets him when you treat your Terran so poorly, so stop doing it and he can focus on his regeneration, or I will have to start sending you on the errands I send him,” Bach continued.
“You are not looking so well yourself.” Enric pointed to Bach’s forehead. “You’re sweating.”
“I want you to send your Terran away. Take her to the Terrans’ island at Norton and tell her to stay there until it is safe enough to go back to her family.”
“What?” Enric laughed, and then nodded. “Fine and I will even apologize to Felip. So, can I see my new Thayn now?”
“She is not here to be renewed.”
“Huh? You refused to help me get a Thayn, but you bring one in here to live amongst us freely? No, renew her Bach, even for yourself. Terrans do not live among us, they serve us or they die.”
Enric was right, only Terrans who were turned into Thayn were allowed to live among the Family. Bach could barely stand Thayns, why did he think he would feel differently with a free Terran?
“Unless—she really is for me?” Enric let out a loud laugh.
Bach scowled.
* * * * *
The next morning, Wisteria woke up in complete darkness. She lay back on her pillow, trying to recall what had happened. The bed felt different. She reached for the rechargeable flashlight she kept by her bedside, but couldn’t find it, and the bedside felt strange. What was going on? As her eyes adjusted to the light, she discovered she was lying on black satin sheets, on a strange bed, in a huge room. Quickly, she threw the covers off and hurried out of bed.
“Ah,” she growled as she landed on her sore ankle. Looking down, she was surprised to find her ankle bandaged. Was this Doctor Hindle’s house? She knew some of the residents on the island lived quite comfortably, but not this nicely since the outbreak. The room felt air-conditioned. She limped to the massive window and pulled back the curtains. She was astonished to find herself in a tall building overlooking a city. Big Ben stood in the distance.
“What is this?” she exclaimed.
She was in London, eighty miles northwest of the Isle of Smythe.
“I am glad to see you are awake,” someone spoke with a strange accent. He almost sounded American.
Wisteria spun around to see a tall teenage boy with messy brown hair and incredible green eyes, standing in the doorway, carrying a tray.
“Hello,” he greeted her.
“Hi.” She tried to sound cool.
He was dressed strangely. Granted, nowadays fashion was the last thing on anyone’s mind, but this boy’s clothing looked old, like they were from the 1920s or earlier. He wore a green striped shirt. His expensive looking dark gray trousers were held up with suspenders. Weirdest still, he wore brand new leather shoes.
Where would he get clothes like this from a city with biters? Why would he spend the time to pick out an outfit when food, medicine and weapons were far more important?
“I brought you dinner; unless you are a vegetarian.” He switched on the lights.
“No, I’m not.” She gazed at the tray. “Who are you?”
The tray held a steak and a salad of some kind. The food smelled amazing. The ingredients looked fresh, not like the dried powdered food she ate on the Island. The vegetables were very exotic and definitely out of season.
She wanted to ask him questions, but was transfixed by the fresh steak.
“I am Felip.”
“Felip,” she echoed. “Where am I?”
“You do not know?” He placed the tray on the small table. “We are in London.”
“We can’t be in London.” This has to be a dream.
Felip simpered as if he were amused by her statement “I was unsure what you wanted to drink, so I brought water. Do you want any ice?”
“Ice?” Wisteria hadn’t even seen ice in years. “What exactly is going on here? How did I get here? What day is it today?”
“Ninth of March.” He took a chain watch out of his pocket.
“I left home on the twenty-sixth of March.”
“But who knows what the date is nowadays. You have been out for a few hours. I was a bit concerned, since there are not a lot of doctors out here. Why do you not get some food in you, and then we will talk.”
Her mind flashed back to what happened earlier. She recalled the events leading up to her fall, outside Cunningham’s, and winced. “Thank you,” she muttered. “For taking care of me and for the food. I feel a lot better. I should be going.” But her ankle was swollen. The pain was agonizing and she felt the beginning of a migraine. How was she going to get out of here? How was she going to get home?
“You are safe here. True, you have no reason to trust me, but you are safe here.”
“It’s not that.” Unaware of what this guy really wanted, she wasn’t going to cross him. During the dark days, after the outbreak, when she travelled with her family, they ran into people who pretended to be nice, but later tried to rob them or feed them to the biters. She forced a smile. “I’d just like to get home. My family will be out of their minds looking for me. Please?”
“Of course, you are a guest here. You can go whenever you like, but it might make sense to eat first. I hear it can be rough out there and getting a meal can be hard.”
A good meal outside was an abnormality and a miracle in the dark days. The supermarkets and food shops were quickly ransacked as people got sicker. The only places that had anything usable had been crawling with biters. As a result, Wisteria and her family had eaten rats more times than she cared to remember.
“If she wants to go, let her.” A stern voice came from the door. “But you should know an even larger swarm than the one you encountered in the shop is on their way through this city.” Another boy appeared at the doorway. He too, spoke with the peculiar accent. He looked to be about Wisteria’s age or maybe a little older, and he was tall, taller than Felip. Hidden behind his messy black hair, his piercing green eyes were fixed on her.
As he stared intently at her with his arms folded tightly over his chest, she saw a series of black tattoos running down the sides of his defined biceps to his elbow. He was dressed similarly to Felip execpt he wore all black and had on red shoes. “But I will not take you back through the swarm of the infected that is on their way.”
“Bach, how bad is it?” Felip turned to the other boy.
“About two thousand are coming from the east and are heading north,” he answered, and then conversed with the other boy in a strange language that sounded oddly familiar. He glanced at Wisteria, as if he was angry about something. Then, he left her alone with Felip.
“Did he bring me here?” She was relieved that the cold, strange boy was gone.
“Bach? Yes he did.”
“And he knows there’s swarm of biters heading this way?”
Felip nodded.
“No one can predict how the biters move,” Wisteria retorted. “It’s impossible.” She knew the scientists and trackers on the Isle of Smythe had been trying to predict that for years.
Felip looked at her as if she was insane, but then he smiled.
“If we could do that, I would never be caught in an overrun,” she said.
“An overrun?” he asked.
“Well, I call it an overrun. It’s when a swarm of hundreds, or sometimes thousands of biters, flood through while devouring everything.” During the outbreak, Bristol was flooded with hundreds of biters that turned into tens of thousands overnight. Luckily, Wisteria and her family had hid in an old Cold War fallout shelter with an elderly couple, the Lawsons. This was when Wisteria’s mother got the idea about the bunkers when they settled on the Isle of Smythe.
“Then you know there is almost no way you could survive it,” Felip said.
“So, you just wait for the biters to get here?” she asked.
Again, he looked slightly confused. “We are safe here. Please eat something, and then get some rest. I promise I will answer your questions later.” He left the room, but didn’t close the door.
She didn’t know what to think. These boys could be setting her up as bait or maybe they were part of a cult. She walked back to the window and peered down. It was kind of hard to make out was happening below, but she noticed some movements.
“Here.”
She jumped at the voice.
Bach stood in the doorway. “Felip says that you need proof of what I said.” He held out a pair of binoculars.
“It’s okay, I believe you.” She only agreed so she wouldn’t provoke her captors or rescuers. She didn’t know who these people were.
“No, you do not.” He was still holding them out to her. “I want you to see for yourself.”
She cautiously took the binoculars, noting that Bach was sweating a little. She swung them over to look out of the window. She felt devastated by the destruction she saw below. The streets were littered with burnt and crashed vehicles. Rotten bodies lay everywhere. The shops had been looted or vandalized by survivors. This wasn’t the city she remembered visiting years ago. Was this what it was like in her real home? Her mind went to her home and her extended family. She shuddered.
“Are you all right?” Bach asked.
“Of course.” She attempted to smile. Looking through the binoculars again, she saw three biters in tattered fancy dress, shuffling through streets. Seconds later, she spotted groups of twenty or so, all wearing red football jerseys staggering slowly behind them. As the moonlight shone through street, one of the biters gazed up as if looking at her. Wisteria quickly dropped behind the curtain. “Kill the lights,” she said to Bach, who was now standing by the door.
“Why? I am sure Felip told you, we are safe up here?”
“Please?”
He switched off the lights.
Peeking out again, there were forty biters now roaming through the street below. Wisteria was trapped here with no way out.
