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Alfie turned over on his other side for the umpteenth time that night, struggling and failing to get comfortable with a rock poking his hip through the sleeping bag. He’d never been one for camping, and it had been no different if it’d been a tent in a sunny clearing in a tranquil forest rather than on the open plains of a zombie-infested resort.
The situation being the latter did nothing to ease his discomfort, however. He attempted to convince himself that the moaning and gurgling he kept hearing not more than a few feet away were nothing but figments of his imagination, yet the slightest gust of wind bending the sides of his tent inwards suddenly became an approaching zombie mindlessly tripping over the loose fabric or one of the pegs, and the low rustle of the dry grass suddenly sounded like dragging footsteps and raspy breathing.
Next to him, Jack had his back turned and was snoring so loudly that Alfie wouldn’t have been surprised if a zombie had barged in for a sleepover within the next five minutes. It didn’t, thankfully, but Alfie was perplexed by Jack’s ability to sleep like a dead man with the dead literally walking around outside.
They had read online that the first night out there was always the hardest, but Alfie hadn’t imagined it’d be this bad. And if it went on like this, he knew he had several more sleepless nights ahead of him to look forward to.
Just the thought of it wore him out. With a groan, he sat up, looking around in the dark with eyes that had long since adjusted to the blackness. The glow from the campfire cast a bright, flickering circle on the tent’s closed flap, and he could faintly hear conversation from outside. He debated for a moment whether he should join them or attempt once more to go to sleep, but when Jack snored yet again, seemingly louder and more obnoxiously than any of his previous breaths, Alfie’s mind had been made up.
After putting on his glasses and untangling his legs from the sleeping bag, he got to his feet, pulled away the flap of the tent, and stepped into the low, orange light of the fire. Around it sat Melanie and Lewis next to each other, Melanie leaning against Lewis and Lewis with his arm around her shoulders, Sadie a few feet away from them, and Archer was on his own on the opposite side. Nevins seemed to be asleep in his own tent, nowhere to be found among the others. Alfie supposed that working at the Rezort and sleeping out there night after night caused the growling of distant zombies to begin functioning as a lullaby. He then wondered when he’d be able to hear the music.
Upon emerging from the tent, four pairs of eyes turned to him and made him feel self-conscious, so he came over and sat down on the ground in the space between Lewis and Sadie. He could feel Archer’s stoic, piercing gaze from the other side of the fire and realised he was frankly rather terrified of Archer’s presence. He found it oddly fitting that, while the others held bottles of beer in their hands, Archer held his rifle, which he was polishing meticulously with a rag. The sight made Alfie want to furrow his brows in instinctive wariness, but he staved off the impulse and hoped he looked somewhat calm.
“Can’t sleep?” Lewis was reaching a beer out to him with a kind smile.
Alfie shook his head, gratefully taking the bottle. “Too hyped up about it all, y’know?” He almost grimaced at the faux exaltation, but thanked the low light for not betraying his fear.
Lewis nodded, understanding. “I get you. I got the same way sometimes when I was in the war. You guys seem like you’ve been here before?”
“We haven’t, actually. We’ve been wanting to, and then we were lucky enough to win a tournament in this shooter we play.” His fingers absentmindedly played with a loose corner on the bottle label. “Jack wanted us to come prepared, so… we’ve been reading a lot about this place online.”
“Genocide, right?” Sadie asked, not sounding particularly amused. “It sounds like a wonderful game, just by the name alone.”
Her comment was dripping of sarcasm and suppressed malice, and Alfie was both at a loss how to justify playing it and baffled by her sudden hostility. “It—It’s just for fun.” He shrugged. “There’s not much to it.”
She took a swig of her bottle and turned her eyes back to Alfie, scrutinising and intense. “There is, though, isn’t there? Teens play that game and get it into their excitable, little heads that killing them is fun, and then they’ll do anything to come here and buy into this… human safari to live out their wet dream.”
“Sadie, leave him alone,” Lewis attempted.
Sadie exhaled a laugh, sending Lewis a glance. “I just don’t understand how they can be so… so ecstatic about this.” Judging by the tone in her voice, it was something she had wanted to say since the group had been assembled that morning. “How can you… They’re human, still. Just like us.”
Alfie swallowed, unsure how he should convincingly defend a belief he didn’t even wish to defend. He pulled his legs close to himself and wrapped his arms around his knees. “I dunno… they don’t seem very human to me.” He took a sip of his beer, extending the moment in which he could think of a believable argument. “I don’t think they have any thoughts or feelings, other than… y’know… hunt, kill. They just walk around out there and bump into each other now and again.”
Sadie hadn’t raised her voice – yet – but the look she shot Alfie was enough to give away all the anger held inside. “So if you ever turn into one of them, you’d want to be slaughtered like some… some mindless animal?”
“Sadie!” Melanie attempted to mediate the tone.
“Yeah,” Alfie retaliated, paying no heed to Melanie. “’Cause even if they do have feelings, what kind of life is that? Just… staggering about with no purpose?”
“So as soon as someone doesn’t have a role to fill, they should be murdered?”
Alfie was growing gradually more frustrated with the conversation, which seemed to have become more of an interrogation. “I never said that!”
“Enough!” Archer’s voice was sudden, loud and stern and rang out in their small encampment as silence fell over the others immediately. For a tense moment, the only sound that was heard was the peaceful crackle of the fire and the chirps of distant cicadas hidden in the grass. “You could wake the dead, the way you’re all piping up.”
His steely eyes surveyed over Sadie, then Alfie. When he let up to look over his rifle one last time, Alfie realised he had been holding his breath under the scrutiny of Archer’s gaze, paralysed like a hare staring into the barrel of a shotgun. He exhaled as Archer stuffed the dirty rag in his pocket and put the rifle on his back, strap extending across his chest.
“I’ve killed more of those guys than I can count,” Archer continued in a lower, more conversational voice, yet still with his usual gruffness and cool demeanour. He picked up his bottle, which had been standing on the ground next to the boulder he was sitting on. “But do you think I enjoy it? Do you see me jumping for joy every time I get to aim at one of them? I see it as a mercy.” He took a sip of his beer. “No one can be sure, o’course, but even if there really is somethin’ human left in there, they seem to have lost control over their bodies long ago. I see it as a help; putting them out of their misery.”
“I assume you served in the war, Archer?” Melanie asked, unexpectedly.
Archer nodded. “Did indeed.”
“Have you ever watched someone you know turn?”
He was still for a second. Then he nodded again.
“Did you put them out of their misery, too?”
Alfie turned his head and was surprised to see the determined resolution on her face. She had the fire in her eyes of a woman who had been through the inferno of an emotional hell and come out on the other side not unscathed, but as a changed person, rather than a broken one. He found himself admiring it.
“It’s a soldier’s duty to prevent others from turning, if they can. So I did what I had to.”
Melanie’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I couldn’t even shoot a random woman out there today. I’d never seen her before; I didn’t know her name, her family, her job. She was a stranger. But when she turned around and looked at me, it felt like I was… I was still looking at a human being. What I don’t understand is how you can know someone, be friends with them, fight with them in a war, and still… still pull the trigger…?”
Archer leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and looking thoughtful. “Motivation,” he said, simply.
Melanie blinked in confusion. “What?”
“I used the memory of the ones I’d already lost as a… a pick-me-up to do it. And I made it my goal not to lose any more people to the syndrome.”
Alfie noticed a small smile pull at one corner of Melanie’s mouth. “Then I should be going hog-wild out here, like you, guns blazing, because my father was a soldier, too. I watched him turn. And yet, when I made eye contact with that woman, I remembered that she used to be someone. Everyone stumbling about in the herds out there used to be someone. They were people, and some of them might even have been soldiers themselves. And what are we doing to honour them? Shooting them down, as if they were nothing but game? That doesn’t seem like a very noble cause to me.”
With that, Melanie fell silent and downed the rest of her beer, then placed the empty bottle beside her. Archer said no more, but remained in his hunched-over position, seemingly ponderous. Alfie noticed Lewis’ hand, which had been lightly touching Melanie’s back while she was talking, drop to rest in his lap as his expression changed subtly. The movement seemed out of place until Alfie remembered that Lewis had fought in the war, too.
Once the silence had stretched on for long enough, Sadie cleared her throat awkwardly and made to get up. “Anyone want another beer?”
Suddenly remembering he even had one, Alfie gripped the cool bottle tighter, feeling the weight of the liquid inside. He had barely drunk anything, but then again, he didn’t much care for the taste of beer, anyway, and only accepted it to be polite. He watched as Sadie took a bottle out of the nearby cool box, opened it, and handed it to Melanie. Archer declined another drink, saying that he wanted his wits about him the next day, and Lewis simply had an inscrutable expression on his face as he stared into the fire.
“D’you want a beer, Lewis?” Sadie asked when she got no reply from him, already reaching her hand back into the cooler. “You gave your spare to Alfie.”
Lewis blinked and inhaled as if he’d forgotten to breathe, then his gaze flickered to Sadie for a moment. “No, that’s all right. I think I’m actually going to go to sleep. Gotta be rested for tomorrow and all.” He stood up and brushed off the dust from the back of his pants, and didn’t even spare Melanie a glance before he began heading toward their tent. “Goodnight.”
Melanie didn’t say anything, but simply followed him with her eyes until the flap of the tent closed behind him. Then she sighed and massaged her forehead with her fingers.
The atmosphere became thick and tense, and nobody wanted to pierce it by questioning what had just happened. So instead, when the silence became too uncomfortable, Melanie said: “This beer is dreadful.”
It was an entirely unexpected comment, and it caused a both nervous and amused chuckle to ripple through the group. Even Archer managed a small smile.
“I think it’s just the cheapest piss they could get,” Sadie replied, inspecting the label on her bottle. “You’d imagine they could splurge a bit for their guests, don’t you think?”
With the mood lightening, Alfie felt confident enough to re-join the conversation. “All beer tastes like piss to me, actually. I don’t really like it.”
Sadie furrowed her brow. “Then why’d you take it? Nobody’s forcing you to drink.”
Alfie shrugged. “Jack drinks, so I guess I’m trying to get myself to like it so we can have fun together. He’s… also the one who wanted to come here the most. I just came along because he’s my best friend.”
Archer was looking at him, but not with the same scrutinising and analytical glare as before. This time, it felt friendly and understanding. “You don’t really like killing them, do you?”
The question took Alfie aback, and he was shocked that his play to the gallery was apparently so poor that it was seen through and torn down almost immediately. “Um…” was all he could say before Archer spoke again.
“I noticed you haven’t been looking as excited as Jack. Like you’ve just been following his lead. And when I shot at the herd, you looked more horrified than anything – not like someone who’s having the time of their life.”
Alfie’s mind was racing, trying to figure out how this stranger he had just met the previous day could penetrate his mind and snake his way into his secrets when even Jack, who he’d known for years, was too dense to get a clue. He supposed he might’ve been more careless with holding up the front because the Rezort turned out to be more terrifying than he’d imagined, and he’d been too concerned with surviving the stay to focus on it.
Maybe it was also just a thing retired soldiers had – the ability to know people and to pick up on hints.
Alfie could do nothing but smile and huff a laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” He put his almost full beer on the ground and stretched his legs in front of him. “I hate seeing the zombies walking around, I hate seeing them get killed. I hate this island, I hate this resort. I hate guns. I just wish I was home – in my bed – listening to my music.”
He paused.
“I came here because I love Jack. And he loves this shit; you should see him when we play Genocide. I thought maybe his hype would… rub off on me if I came. And I knew it’d make him happy if I did, so…”
Alfie had no idea that Jack had woken up several minutes earlier and had been listening to the conversation from the hideaway of their tent, taking in everything Alfie had been saying. He had no idea that Jack was a few milliseconds from getting up and joining them outside to have an earnest talk with his best friend.
And Alfie would never know, because before Jack had a chance to act on any of his impulses, the first zombie stumbled into their camp.