Page 3 of Such a Feral Little Lamb
My hands tingle with stifled violence. This way would be more satisfying, too.
“Focus,” Rae snaps.
“S-sorry,” Autumn whispers. She should be more concerned that she has Dane’s and Blake’s attention. Of course she won’t be taking a watch alone, but that they’ve picked her out as a plaything, that they’ve already started bothering her—
That should worry her more than whether or not I like to fuck men.
I place my bat back on my knees and force my spine to loosen, leaning back in my seat. The countryside is still passing us by, and I glare out at the lush green landscape, tuning Rae out. Takes half a day to get up here, what with how disused the tracks are. We’ll be a week in the town before we have to go back.
Eight days. In eight days, I’ll be back behind those walls and maybe I’ll have finally earned enough money to move out of my cramped shared quarters in the centre of the Citadel and into some other shoebox of a place where I can at least have some privacy.
Eight days and maybe I’ll be considered senior enough to build my own team, have some say over where I want to go and clear out.
Eight days.
That’s all I have to survive.
Chapter Two
Gravesendlivesuptoits name. The silence as I get off the train is deafening. Unsettling.
Was it like this twenty years ago? I shrug my bag on properly and follow Rae and Autumn further down the platform. Green paint peels off a rusted fence. The ticket office lies by the gates, and I wander in that direction, though not before taking stock of the way Dane is speaking in low tones to the train driver, who wears his own grave expression.
Confirming our return time, most likely. It doesn’t matter to me. I plan to be here in the morning on the day we leave; the earliest the train will get here will be just after midday.
Missing it isn’t an option, of course. Even if I were to survive the long hike back down to the Citadel, they wouldn’t let me in. No hunter is worth the time and expense of a full examination, and they’re not inclined to wait around andseeif I turn.
Never mind that everyone knows how quickly a bite sinks into the skin, effects showing in a few short hours. Never mind that this is the furthest north a team has ever been because we’ve cleared so much land between here and there.
I peek through the dusty window of the ticket office. No one’s inside. Everything appears to be neatly in its place, in fact, which is a surprise. Panic. That’s what suffuses my memories when I think of the first few days of the outbreak. Hysteria, but justified, because what else were we supposed to do?
And we’ve seen evidence of that at every station we’ve arrived at so far. Shattered glass. Torn-down fences. Old stains that could be rust but are more likely—
Blood. There’s always so much blood.
“Isaac,” Rae calls, and I lift my head, for a moment catching sight of my reflection in the glass. Hollow-eyed. Hollow-cheeked. I look half-dead myself, and I don’t let my gaze linger. I amble back down the platform to where the others are all standing.
The train rumbles away. The taste of petrol lingers in the air, familiar to me now, but feeling somehow out of place here. We all fall silent until it snakes away in the distance.
“He’ll be back at midday on the eleventh,” Dane says. “You know our job. Clear this town. We need a clean sweep before we get back aboard.”
Otto frowns, tilting his head back to take in what we can see of the town beyond the station. Not much from here, even athis height. A ramshackle row of houses squats across the road, but it’s a narrow lane—no pavement—that I assume leads to whatever this town considers its centre.
He wipes his brow, pale skin already pinking despite the gloom. “Clean sweep? I checked the map. It’s not a small place.”
“It’s empty,” Blake cuts in. “Shouldn’t find many.”
Autumn shivers. She looks spooked already, more like a little girl than a young woman, what with how big her eyes have gone. “Is it always this quiet?”
I tilt my head to listen. Not a bird call for miles, of course, but that’s usually the case wherever there’s an infestation. Animals got bitten too in the beginning. Like rabies, my mum told me.
I don’t really know what that is.
Something we didn’t have, she said. Something we never had.
Was that why we were so unprepared? I’ve no idea about the state of the rest of the world. No one does. Every so often, someone will find themselves on a street corner in the Citadel, will rage about hunger and blood and that it’s only us, the virus never left, never escaped this wild island, and that they know, the ones who rule us, theystartedit.
They never last long, those people. There one second. Gone the next.
