Part 7 (2/2)

Blood ran down from the top of her skull.

Her eyes went bloodshot.

”He's not yours at all,” a voice behind her said.

She fell to the floor when Kane pulled the knife from her skull.

Then he reached down and grabbed her gun.

He smiled at Riley.

”You're all mine to kill. Now on your feet, p.r.i.c.k. It's time we finished up this little journey of ours.”

Chapter Nine.

Amy looked inside the prison cell where they'd been keeping Bob and right away, she knew what'd happened.

It was early. Earlier than she usually woke up and that was saying something. She liked to be awake for the sunrise. A habit she'd always enjoyed, even before the world fell apart. She found she was more productive in the early hours. In her old life, when she wasn't at work, she spent a lot of her time blogging. The real goal was to eventually be making enough money from freelance blogging and writing work that she could quit her job. But honestly, she was barely making ends meet. Turned out n.o.body wanted to hire her to freelance. That bubble, once possible to make gains in, had been burst.

s.h.i.+t. She'd always been late to jump on trends.

Outside, the weather was cool and breezy, the sun barely peeking over the horizon just yet. But in here, aided by her torchlight, she was kind of relieved that it wasn't fully light.

She could build enough of an image of what had gone down simply through the glimmers of red in the torchlight.

Dark red.

Blood red.

There were the smells, too. You might think you know what a bad smell is. And sure, there were plenty of bad smells in this world. But one of the worst, most distinctive smells was the smell of someone who had been disembowelled.

All that partly-digested food dangling there in slimy tubes.

Not something you wanted to smell first thing in a morning.

”And Kane's gone too?”

Melissa nodded. ”That b.a.s.t.a.r.d must've escaped.”

”You were watching him. Right?”

Melissa looked at Amy and right away, Amy could see her guilt. ”He was tied up solid.”

”But he got untied, somehow.”

”You trying to say I've done something?”

Amy put a hand on Melissa's shoulder. Outside, she could hear the murmurs and mumbles as the rest of the camp woke up and came round to a stark new day. They were back to the old order. An order of only women. Suddenly, in one fell swoop, every man had been taken out of this place.

”I'm not trying to say you did anything. I just... understand. That it's been hard to adapt to our latest guests. And if you did do anything, well, I can get why you'd do it.”

Melissa's eyes went watery. She tutted, and shook her head. ”Like I'd do anything.”

Amy smiled and nodded. She could question Melissa some more. Chances were, if Kane had got out, there had been some accident that led to his escape, and seeing as Melissa had been taking Kane's food to him lately, as well as helping him empty his guts, it made sense that she might be involved somehow.

But Amy had no time to be paranoid. She'd spent enough of her life struck down by paranoia. It started in her youth, to be honest. A healthy self-consciousness that struck everyone down.

But it never went away. When she got older, she got that sense people were laughing at her. She got the feeling people were talking about her, behind her back. In the end, she'd got so bogged down by paranoia-the imagined voices of other people-that she'd ended up having to drop out of uni for a year and spend some time on medication.

She'd got better. She'd recovered.

But that niggling paranoia still ate away at her, especially in times like these.

She took a deep breath and let it go.

She had to, especially if she wanted to lead.

She walked outside, Melissa by her side, and headed over to the fences. She climbed the ladders, peered out over the woods. She didn't know where they'd gone, Kane and Riley. But she could guess at two things. Either Riley had taken Kane in his unstable, vengeful state. Or Kane had taken Riley, in his own brand of vengeance.

Judging by the state of Bob, Amy took a guess that Kane had one-upped Riley somehow.

Unless Riley had found out where Bob and, therefore, Mattius' camp was, leading him to kill Bob when his purpose waned.

”We found something,” Melissa said. ”Something on Bob's body.”

She lifted a little black box and held it out in front of Amy.

”What is that?”

”Portable camera, by the looks of things.”

Amy narrowed her eyes. ”A camera?”

”It was strapped to his chest. And it looks like it's a 3G camera, so it wouldn't require a WiFi network to connect to wherever it's being viewed from.”

”But the mobile networks are down. There's no way this could've bounced a signal back to... well, wherever.”

”Not unless they've found a way to create their own signal. Their own network.”

Amy held the camera in her hand. She looked into its lens. She felt like someone was looking at her, through the other side.

”So what do we do about them now?” Melissa asked.

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