(I'll be honest and say I struggled writing this chapter. I knew the main things that needed to happen and that I wanted to learn more about Cherry, but other than that I don't think it's that great. Any feedback is appreciated

9. The Farm

With a fierce brutality, Kurt kicked the door to the back room open and wielded the shotgun high. His eyes raked through the space in a fraction of a second, desperate to find his little sister. Macey cowered in the far corner, her back pressed against the wall by the window. Her mouth was frozen open in a silent scream. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, combatting a sudden whip of cold air. Why was it cold? His eyes drifted back to the window.

It was open.

‘Katie?’ he shouted frantically, feeling Lola rush in beside him. He swung his shotgun around, knocking her out of the way. He looked at Macey. ‘Where is she?’

She raised her right hand and pointed a finger across the room where the door to the downstairs bathroom hung ajar, spilling a thin sliver of light onto the floor. Kurt didn’t think; he lunged straight for the bathroom, whipping himself around the corner like a bullet. 

His heart stopped.

There she was, sprawled across the cold linoleum, her red hair splayed out on the tile, drowning her face in a sea of red. Her hair wasn’t the only red thing in the room. Her neck was gone, torn into a jagged crater that was still bubbling, spouting heavy, dark arterial spurts across her pale, freckled chest. Standing over her was an Invader; its skin pale and taut with rancid slime that drooled down its chin, mingling with the blood on Katie’s collarbone. Chunks of pink flesh were stuck firmly in its rotten, yellow teeth. There were deep gouges in the floorboards and the walls, where its sharp claws had pinned Katie down to feed. Slowly, with the sickening crack of grinding vertebrae, it tilted its head, milky eyes locking onto Kurt.

Kurt pulled the trigger on his shotgun and sent the thing flying backwards into the cistern of the toilet before it got the chance to pounce. The china shattered into large, sharp pieces as it hit the wall, then fell to the ground around Katie. The creature let out a deep, throaty gurgling sound, with viscous, green liquid suddenly sweeping from its mouth. It struggled up again, trying to push itself onto all fours. The legs had been sliced by the broken cistern pieces, so it dragged itself forward with its arms, crawling over Katie’s twitching body and snapping its jaws towards Kurt.

‘OVER HERE!’ came a voice, and the creature sniffed in the direction of the backdoor, where Lola was now standing, holding Rev’s bat high above her head. It swiped for her with its claws but she brought the bat down over its head with a sickening crunch that dashed its shrivelled brain into the floor. 

The silence that followed was deafening. Kurt dropped to the ground, the white ash from the shotgun still hot on his hands. He crawled over to the bathroom floor, not caring that the Invader’s cold flaps of skin broke off against his knees and clung to his trousers, not caring about how much blood he was getting on himself.

‘Katie?’ he said, pressing his hands over her neck, trying to stem the bleeding. He looked hopelessly at Lola and the others, who had gathered in horror behind her. ‘If she’s still bleeding, her heart must still be beating, right? Right?’

He let go of the wound and blood pumped out faster. He put his ear to her chest. ‘She’s still breathing!’ He shouted, desperately trying to recall how to perform CPR. Thirty compressions. Two breaths. He locked his fingers together over her sternum and drove his weight down. One. Two. Three. Four.  One. Two. Three. Four. With every hard strike of his palms, more blood bubbled up at her neck. 

‘Help me!’ he screamed, trying to stop the blood pulsating through his fingers again, but it was slick and impossible to hold back. ‘SOMEBODY FUCKING HELP ME!’

Lola ran to his side, practically skidding along the floor on her knees as she reached him. She grabbed hold of Katie’s face, steadying her head, but with the flutter of her eyelids, she went still. The blood slowed to a trickle, then stopped. 

Kurt let out an almost guttural howl, a noise closer to what the Invaders made when they attacked. A tear rolled down his cheek and splashed onto Katie’s face, diluting the arterial spray that had painted her. His hands were still firmly pressed on the wound, covered in his little sister’s blood. Leaning down, he pressed his forehead against hers. Unable to stop the tears now, he almost collapsed on top of her; a flurry of anger and sadness rolled out of him into one big anguished scream.

Turning quickly to the others, Lola sobbed, ‘Get the kids out of here! Check all the doors and all the windows.’ She stood up, her entire body shaking. Kurt didn’t move. He stayed hugging Katie’s corpse as if she might just be sleeping.

Someone else came over to him. 

‘Kurt, darling, come here,’ they said, kneeling beside him. It was Cherry. She handed him a towel and tried to wrap him in it. He looked at it like it was a weapon. Wiping his hands meant erasing the last physical trace of her. In a dreamy haze, he sank into the floorboard next to Katie, his hand resting against her cheek. He thought back to yesterday, how he’d felt like an old man who wanted to retire. If he hadn’t been so stubborn, if he had listened to Katie only a few hours before, would she still be here? If they had packed up the farm and left, right then, when she said it, would the creature still have gotten in? It must have been a straggler from the pack chasing Macey, and the window - someone must have left it open. It didn’t matter who. It was his fault. He should never have been in charge. 

***

‘What the fuck happened?’ Lola yelled, rage bubbling out of her. She charged over to Macey and shoved her hard, leaving a bloodied handprint on her top. Aside from the old blood stains, the ones she said were from Tommy, she was clean, like she hadn’t even tried to help Katie once the creature attacked. ‘You opened that window, didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t! I swear to God I didn’t!’ Macey squeaked, her hands flying up to cover her head as she was slammed against the wall. She looked down at the bloody handprint on her top and started hyperventilating. ‘It was already open when I came in, I swear! She - Katie - came in and she went over to close it and the thing jumped in and she tried to run and -’

‘Shut up!’ Lola snapped, leering in angrily at the girl. ‘That’s two of our people you’ve gotten killed. Is that your plan? Take us out, one by one, then have the farm to yourself?’

‘Rev made his own decision! Katie did too!’ Macey shrieked, backing into the wall. ‘I warned her, Lola! It’s not my fault she didn’t listen!’ 

That was it. Something in Lola snapped.

That was it. Lola snapped and drove her knuckles straight into Macey’s nose. How dare she try to blame Katie? Lola had locked that window. The Invaders opened the lock into the barn, that made sense. The lock was on the outside. But the window locked from the inside with a small bolt, a small bolt she knew she had locked. She drew her fist back again, but Cherry grabbed ahold of her and pulled her backwards. They toppled over, landing next to the invader’s corpse. Macey cupped a hand up under her nose, which was now pouring blood.

‘She’s crazy!’ Macey shrieked, pointing at Lola.

Cherry called for Malcolm, who had been in the kitchen with the others. ‘Mal, can you get the first aid kit for Macey and take her somewhere else?’

He nodded and put an arm around Macey as he guided her out of the room, which made Lola madder.

 She buried her head into Cherry’s shoulder and began to cry. ‘Why does nobody ever believe me?’

‘It’s okay, petal. I believe you,’ Cherry said, though her voice said she wasn’t sure. Lola pushed her away and pulled herself up off the floor using the sofa. Mere feet away lay the creature, the foul-smelling, rotting creature that had ruined their lives. She gave it a mighty kick with her boots.

‘What should we do?’ Cherry asked, chewing at an already bloodied lip as she stood up. She was staring at Kurt and Katie in the bathroom. ‘We can’t just leave her there. We need to bury her. We need to get him away from her.’

‘Let's deal with this thing first,’ Lola replied, kicking the dead Invader again. The frail body shook under the impact, shifting the thin skin over the ribs. ‘I really don’t want to touch it.’

Cherry was still chewing at her lip. ‘Do you think it’s safe outside?’

‘Well, we’ll have to check,’ she said, grabbing Rev’s bat off the floor where she’d left it. It was still slick with pieces of brain and gore. She marched over to the back door and unlocked it before pulling it open. In the far side of Kurt’s garden, a panel in the fence had been torn off. She pointed it out to Cherry. ‘Look, that’s how it got in.’

Gripping the bat firmly in her hands, Lola advanced forward into the garden. She surveyed the area, looking for anything that might point to more invaders having made their way in. There was no movement except the rustling of the trees in the distance, and the cry of a seagull overhead. Cherry shut the door behind them, and they both crossed to the fence. It was a section that had only been repaired recently, and Kurt’s toolbox was still sitting open beside it.

‘You any good with a hammer, Cherry?’ Lola asked, setting the bat down against the fence. She bent down and ran her finger across the deep gouges that had been made in the wood. ‘Look at this.’

 ‘That thing ripped this clean off,’ Cherry said, crouching beside her. Lola noticed that she was still chewing her lip, and that her face was pale. ‘I’m not trying to be funny, but what good will a few more nails in a few more bits of wood do?’

‘It’ll hold us until we come up with a better plan,’ Lola started pulling long nails out of the tool box, realising she sounded like Kurt. ‘We can’t go anywhere. Not with Kurt like that and with Katie…’ she trailed off, then gulped. ‘Can you hold that plank up?’

Cherry obeyed and held up the wood, gripping it so hard her knuckles turned white. Lola started to hammer the nails in, and with each swing she pictured herself smashing open the head of that invader. She could almost hear the crunch of the skull over the hollow thud of the hammer against the nail. Her own strength had surprised her. She’d been good with the shotgun, but that was different. You could kill them from a distance. Being that close to one felt different. It wasn’t entirely a horrible feeling. Of course there was the sinking, twisting, pulling in her gut; that had never left since this all began. But there was something else. A tiny spark that was growing and growing. She brought the hammer down as hard as she could with a thwack.

‘You’re going to bend the nails if you hit them like that,’ Cherry said.

‘Huh?’

‘I’m just saying,’ Cherry flinched backwards with a sharp intake of breath as Lola slammed the hammer down again. Clang. Clang. ‘If the fence is weak, they won't need to rip it off; they’ll be able to push through it again. So you need to hit it at a forty-five degree angle so they lock the grain.’

‘Why didn’t you answer me when I asked if you were good with a hammer?’ Lola held the tool out to her. 

Cherry snatched the hammer, her eyes darting over Lola’s shoulder, then down at the rust-pitted toolbox. Her breathing was fast, shallow. ‘These are finishing nails,’ she muttered rapidly, her thumb compulsively scraping over the metal. ‘They’re wrong. They’ll snap as soon as anything puts pressure on it. What we need is -’ she rummaged in the toolbox and produced a hand of thicker, galvanised nails. ‘These. We need lots of these.’

‘How do you know this stuff?’

‘My dad,’ she choked out, positioning the first nail with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking. She whacked it at an angle with short, panicked taps, the opposite of Lola’s violent rhythm. Lola watched on, mentally noting her technique. ‘He was a builder. He built me this amazing treehouse, with a ladder up to it, and a little table and chair to go inside so I could do my painting up there.’ She hit the nail again until it was flush against the wood. ‘He tried to teach me, but I was so scared that I would be bad at it that I didn’t even try.’ She took another nail and repeated the process. ‘When I first came here, and I saw Kurt building the fence, I wanted to tell him he was doing it wrong. But I was scared,’ she whispered, her voice cracking. ‘What if I got it wrong and let them in? But now... oh God, Lola, what if it got in because I didn’t say anything?’

‘Nothing is your fault,’ Lola said sternly, though she knew the feeling.

Cherry finished hammering the last nail then took a step back. ‘That should hold for now, but it’ll need more reinforcements.’

‘Let's just get that disgusting creature out here before we start brainstorming anything,’ Lola said as they headed back inside. She quickly looked into the bathroom at Kurt, who was still curled up on the floor beside Katie. They took blankets from the sofa and bundled the creature up as well as they could. When she took a hold of its hands, even through the thick towel she could feel the skin sliding off of its bones. It weighed nearly nothing, but when they moved outside she saw that most of it had been left trailing behind them, further staining the floorboards. The two of them chucked the body onto the fire pit. Cherry dowsed the blankets in lighter fluid that she’d found in the toolbox, and Lola fetched a match from inside. When she struck it, she stared into the little flame for a moment, watching it struggle in the breeze before throwing it onto the body and watching the little flame ignite into a roaring fire.

‘I should check on Ben, Alys and Anwen,’ Cherry said, chewing her lip again. ‘They’ll be scared without me.’

‘I need to check on Kurt,’ Lola nodded. She looked Cherry in her hazel eyes and let a tear slip down her cheek. ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m going to say to him. I don’t know what to do.’

‘I do,’ Cherry said, grabbing Lola’s hand and squeezing it tight. ‘We’re gonna need some spades, some flowers, and some lye.’

Lola’s mouth twisted. ‘Lye?’

‘For Katie. For when we bury her, I mean. It's a chemical, and it stops the smell, I think. My mum poured it over our dog when we buried him in the back garden. It’s so the animals don’t dig her up.’

The thought of burying Katie hadn’t even occurred to Lola yet. She was too good at compartmentalising, sorting out the many issues in life into little boxes in her brain then opening them one at a time. The Invader box was ticked off and burned. The next box, the one marked Macey, was practically screaming to be kicked open. But Kurt... Kurt was the wild card. How the hell was he supposed to drag himself back from this? When Jamie died, she’d had nightmares for two months, and as much as it had hurt, she knew it was different. Jamie had been a boy she knew for three weeks, a boy she had kissed once behind the barn. Katie was Kurt’s sister, his only remaining family, his entire reason for being. She squeezed Cherry’s hand and wished she didn’t have to let go.