“Are you kidding me?” said Carl. “What virus acts that fast? What virus gets to someone just by swigging from the same bottle?”
Nick thought about Deana and how she had kissed James’s wounded finger before putting a Beano plaster on it. Had that been all it had taken for her to catch it from her son? And, for that matter, was the kid at school that bit James’s finger the one that passed it on to him?
“It can’t be…” said Nick. “It can’t be that contagious.”
“It is what it is,” said Jan. “We need to put her out of her misery before she loses it and comes after us. It’s a kindness, believe me.”
“Fuck you,” Kathryn screamed. “You’re all fucking insane. You can’t kill me. I’m fin-” More wracking coughs caught a hold of her. She dropped to her knees, wheezing.
Dash brought over a large, fist-sized rock and handed it to Jan. “Turn her lights out.”
Jan took the rock and moved towards Kathryn.
Nick stood in his way. “Not going to happen.”
“Move out the man’s way,” Dave ordered. “We have no choice about this.”
“Yeah,” added Carl. “We have to think about ourselves.”
Nick shook his head in disbelief. “Do you all think this is the right way to behave? You think we should just kill an innocent woman like it’s nothing? You think this is okay?”
“I don’t think it’s okay,” said Eve, standing next to Nick.
“Me either,” Pauline agreed. “It’s barbaric.”
“It’s cowardly, is what it is,” said Margaret. “This is not the way people in Britain behave. We’re not French.”
“What about you, Cassie?” Nick asked, trying to gain consensus. “What do you think?”
She looked down at her feet and shrugged. “I don’t want anyone to die.”
“Thank you,” Nick said.
“But I don’t want to be attacked again, either. I think…I think Kathryn is already dead if she has the virus.”
Nick had to blink to believe it. Of all the people to advocate mob violence, shy and quiet Cassie had seemed the least likely.
“You can’t do this,” Nick said, exasperated yet holding firm in front of Jan’s towering frame.
Jan stared down at Nick, his crystal-blue eyes set between twisting crags of crow’s feet and wrinkles. It was a hard expression from a hard man, but it somehow seemed to soften slightly as Nick stood his ground.
Eventually Jan nodded and let the rock fall from his hands to the ground. “It’s bad judgment, brother, but I promised to play things your way, so that’s what I’m going to do. How do you want to proceed?”
Nick sighed and let his shoulders deflate. “We just send her in the opposite direction,” he said. “By the time she turns – loses it, or whatever – we’ll be a mile and half in the other direction. We don’t need to kill-”
A loud wet thud!
Nick spun around and was shocked by what he saw.
Another wet thud!
“Dave, what the hell are you doing?”
Dave was sat astride Kathryn and had just bludgeoned her with two meaty blows from a mean-looking rock. Nick watched in horror as the bus driver prepared to smash the rock down a third time into the terrified woman’s face. She struggled beneath him. The pungent smell of urine wafted through the air and a dark stain appeared on the crotch of her work trousers. Dave was going to kill her.
But, before he had chance to deliver the final blow, Nick tackled the man to the ground and batted the bloody rock aside.
“What the hell are you doing, Nick? We have to do this. Get off me. GET OFF ME!”
Kathryn crawled away on her hands and knees, weeping and moaning as bruising swelled her bleeding face like a balloon.
Nick held Dave down by his wrists and shouted after the woman. “Run, Kathryn. Get out of here now and find some place safe.”
She looked at him like a rabbit in the headlights, her face a crimson mask of blood and gore. She managed to scramble to her feet and, a moment later, she was sprinting through the trees and disappearing into the distance.