Fear of God (Trials of Strength Book 1) (4 page)

‘
Hey, hey,’
she whispered, her hand tugged at my chin. ‘Look at me, don’t look
at them.’

I did as she
asked.

‘
Good,’ she
said. ‘Now, can you tell us your name?’

I just stared. For a
second I started shaking my head, but the men behind Anna bristled
and stepped forward. She hit them with a look and they retreated,
but not far.

‘
Please, no
one is gonna hurt you, but I need your name,
please
?’ she pleaded, her face
desperate.

‘
Lucas,’ I
managed, ‘Bishop, Lucas Bishop.’

Anna’s face relaxed and
the men behind her smiled, apart from Paul. He stood there and
stared, the snarl that didn’t seem to be leaving his face weighed
down on me. Eventually he walked away, the men at his side
followed. What the hell was that all about?

‘
You need to
rest, Lucas,’ Anna said, breaking my thoughts. ‘You’ll be safe, I
promise.’

‘
My head…’ I
gasped, my hand tried to reach it.

It didn’t hurt so much,
but a strange feeling drifted through it.

‘
No, here, lie
down,’ she said, grabbing my hand gently in the air, and pushing on
my shoulders. ‘You hurt it pretty good before, the doc gave you
some sort of painkiller, so expect some
light-headedness.’

I was already ahead of
her, I didn’t know when it had started, but the room tilted. I lay
back down on the hard floor, and Anna sat close by. I think I began
to scare her with my unwavering gaze as she smiled and crinkled her
forehead in question.

‘
What’s, um,
wha-’ I groaned, the pain was distant, but fighting to speak was
hard. ‘What’s going on?’

‘
Later,’ she
said, ‘sleep for now, get your energy back. You’ll need
it.’

My eyes flashed to Paul
at the far side of the room. Anna followed my gaze.

‘
Don’t worry
about him, we got a name out of you, so you’re safe for now, I
promise,’ she whispered, bending down. ‘I’m not going to let that
backwards arse do anything, okay? Just rest, I got you.’

‘
Thank you,’ I
said. ‘You’re an angel.’

She laughed. ‘No, just
Anna, but I’ll do my best.’

I believed her, and fell
asleep.

*

When I opened my eyes
again, I felt better. Physically I was worse, the drugs having run
their course, but clearer headed and alert. I no longer had to
struggle, at least until I tried to sit up.

‘
Whoa,’ I said
as the room spun. ‘That’s not good.’

‘
Feel any
better?’ Anna’s voice came from a few feet away. She sat on the
floor with her back against a wall.

‘
I feel like
I’ve been thrown from a rooftop into oncoming traffic,’ I replied,
waiting for the pounding in my head to subside. ‘You?’

‘
Been better,’
she said.

I looked at her, she was
pale and haggard, but her electric-blue eyes were wide and alert. I
moved my gaze around the room. It wasn’t small, but the dense pack
of people crowded around made it shrink. Pipes ran along the
sandy-coloured walls, twisting up and down, or continuing straight
through. The ground was cold and dirty concrete, but otherwise the
room was completely unremarkable, and I had no idea where we
were.

‘
Underground,’
Anna said, as if reading my mind. ‘We’re underground.’

‘
Underground?’
I echoed and turned to face her.

She reached up and
shifted her dark red hair from her eyes. I couldn’t help but notice
she had a small nose, and a Cupid’s bow mouth.

‘
Well,
underground the underground, if that makes any sense,’ she sighed.
‘I don’t know for sure, but after the attack, Chris brought us
here, deep underground, beneath the sewage and plumbing for the
town.’

I looked back at the
pipes and wondered what they were for when I was suddenly aware of
what she’d said.

‘
Attack?’ I
asked.

The iron bars were still
there in my mind, rejected memories, but I knew soon I would have
to let them in.

Anna stared at me, her
face blank as she started.

‘
Others are
saying it’s the apocalypse, and even less have convinced themselves
none of it happened, but won’t leave to test it out,’ she said.
‘Whether the world or not, one thing’s for sure, our town is
gone.’

For a second I couldn’t
speak. A chill had climbed up my spine, and my stomach dropped. I
was about to call her bluff, laugh and say this was a terrible joke
and if my mother had set it up, I was more than prepared to return
it one day. But the thought of my mother brought down the bars and
the day’s events flashed through my mind. From my father’s heart
attack, my mother on the floor, being attacked and then being
attacked again. I knew she wasn’t lying.

‘
How?’ I
whispered.

Anna looked away. Her
eyes stared at the floor, and I gave her some time. Her face had
changed, she looked like a child, lost and scared. I blinked and it
vanished. She took a deep breath and tried her best to
explain.

‘
Honestly, I
don’t know,’ she said. ‘One minute I’m sitting with my Dad, the
next…’

She stared off into the
distance, and her head shook from side to side.

‘
Anna?’ I
said.

‘
Uh,’ she
coughed and swallowed. ‘Sorry.’

I trembled.
Part of me wanted to run,
needed
to run. It wasn’t true if it wasn’t spoken. It
wasn’t. And then Anna told me the story of how our worlds had been
shattered, and reality, broken.

‘
I was sitting
with my Dad when it happened. What caused it? I don’t know. But one
minute my Mum’s laughing and joking and making dinner,’ Anna said,
her voice becoming like ice as she continued. ‘Then she was
smashing my Dad’s skull in with a hammer.’

‘
What?’ I
gasped.

‘
There was so
much blood, so much screaming. I-I-I thought it was me but…’ she
whispered, her head back to shaking. ‘But it was
her,
no, no not her. That
wasn’t my mother.
It
was screaming.’

I thought of Mr Williams
and the mounds of dead that surrounded him.

Anna’s eyes became misty
and she rubbed at them lightly, staunching the tears before they
began.

‘
What, what do
you mean?’ I whispered.

She stood up and
stretched, her face returned to its stillness. She looked down and
finished her tale.

‘
I don’t know
why or how, I’m not entirely sure when, but we’ve been down here
for as long as you’ve been out. 24 hours roughly,’ she said.
‘People aren’t themselves anymore, Lucas. Families are killing each
other. Friends killing neighbours, neighbours killing strangers, it
doesn’t matter. They just
kill.’

‘
Why?’ I
whispered. But she just shook her head, so I changed my question.
‘What about my welcome party?’

‘
We had to
make sure you weren’t one of them, those
monsters
don’t seem too keen to stop
and chat let alone give you their name, that’s if they can even
speak anymore,’ Anna said and crinkled her forehead. ‘I have no
idea of anything. I just know you haven’t tried to kill us,
so.’

My heart pounded against
my chest, and I wondered if it would ever return to normal. The
same question repeatedly rolled through my head.

What the hell
is going on?

‘
So, Paul and
his gang’s screaming fiasco?’ I asked, determined to keep the
conversation going; determined not to dwell too deeply on what was
happening above us.

Anna narrowed her eyes
and shot a disgusted look over at the men in question. Paul stood
under the arch of what looked like a doorway, but rough around the
edges and without any door. His jet-black hair was dishevelled, and
his muddy-brown eyes stared out into the darkness of a hallway. The
snarl on his face was still there, as if it could keep the things
in the darkness from coming in.

‘
I’m sorry you
woke to that, that man,’ she spat the words out with angry venom.
‘He’s never been the nicest of guys, quick temper and zero
compassion. Why Chris left him with a gun to guard, I don’t know.
He’s more likely to kill us if we breathe funny rather than protect
us.’

I noticed she’d used that
name before.

‘
Who’s Chris?’
I asked.

Before she could answer,
a metallic clang echoed throughout the room. A few screamed, and
some of the group tried to move away, even when they had reached
the walls and pipes.

Paul manoeuvred him and
his men into place on the opening he stood at. The noise was hard
to pinpoint, but it wasn’t loud enough to have come from the room
we were in. Again I noticed how the men’s arms shook as they raised
their guns.

These men have
never fired a weapon like that before, and if they have, never at a
living person.

Everyone stopped
breathing, their eyes and ears locked into darkness.

Anna and I pressed
against the wall opposite, eyes wide as we stared across the room.
I didn’t notice at first, but then someone screamed, and like
dominos, the rest of us. No one had bothered to man the archway at
our end, another doorway leading into another hall. It was that
hole in the wall that a man came through.

Paul turned and
fired.

The
Call

Everything slowed.
Screams clung to the air, my own included. Paul’s face was full of
rage and some twisted determination that contorted his expression,
his gun aimed in the general area where Anna and I stood. The cries
were cut off by a loud explosion of gunfire. Anna smacked into my
side and dragged me to the floor as the bullet hit a pipe and
ricocheted back into the room, luckily avoiding
everyone.

The man who had entered
the room was fast. He ducked and rolled, his hand reached to the
back of his trousers and pulled out a handgun similar to those that
were being fired. He aimed it at Paul and started screaming. I
couldn’t put the words together at first, my head pounded and my
ears rung, but while the man sounded angry, his voice was calm and
cool.

‘
What the fuck
are you doing!?’ the stranger shouted, his voice finally coming
through. ‘Put the gun down or so help me God!’

Paul just looked stunned,
his bravado and snarl replaced with a sort of angry shock. His arm
didn’t drop, and his finger remained on the trigger of the gun. The
two men on either side of him had lowered their weapons, and their
voices were shrill as they tried to defuse a reddening
Paul.

‘
Paul,’ the
stranger said. ‘Put down the gun. It’s alright, no one got hurt,
okay?’

I checked Paul’s face
again and placed the stray emotion on it. Not only was there
surprise, but also guilt. For a man I assumed had never shot a gun,
he’d just opened fire on a live, breathing person.

For a few minutes no one
moved. I’d never experienced anything like it, and I could feel my
mind trying to pull inside itself, shut out the world rather than
face it. The fear was palpable, but finally, Paul lowered his arm
and sat down. The man relaxed too, and shook his head.

‘
If I knew you
were going to be so trigger happy, I would never have left you with
a gun,’ he said, but by the looks on the faces of those around us,
it didn’t look like he had had anyone else he could have
asked.

Anna sat up, and I was
vaguely aware of her asking if I was alright.

‘
No, no. I am
not alright,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t happen. That, this,
whatever’s…’

Anna moved closer and
took my hand, telling me to breathe in and out. Her voice was calm
and strong, and I wondered how she did it.

‘
I brought
some food and water,’ the man said. ‘But I couldn’t find any other
survivors, just more bodies.’

He said it so
matter of fact, like an everyday occurrence, but some of the room
broke into tears. The rest of their family and friends were out
there,
my family
was out there. At that remembrance I shot up and swayed, the
world shook while a fresh pain erupted in my head. Anna looked up
at me, surprised.

‘
Anna, I need
to go. I need to get my Mum and Dad,’ I said quickly. ‘My Dad, he
had a heart attack and my Mum, she, I have to go.’

I couldn’t move though.
The world up top had changed and fear held me prisoner.

‘
Lucas,’ Anna
whispered sympathetically as she stood, ‘you can’t.’

I shook my head. ‘I have
to, my family.’

A few other people had
stepped up too, their faces and voices directed at the man who had
brought food. They were echoing my statements, voices frantic and
rising, becoming a flurry of panic. Chris, one of them said, the
man Anna had mentioned.

He waved his hand in
dismissal though, and the voices grew louder, angrier, people
desperate to find their missing members.