Such a Feral Little Lamb

Chapter One

W ild, empty fields roll off in every direction as our train chugs through the silent landscape. Above, grey clouds gather, almost ominous in their appearance. I tip my head back to trace the outline of one. If I stuck a knife into its underbelly, would rain come tumbling out?

I know if I did, I’d feel nothing at all.

“Don’t turn your back on them until you’re certain they’re dead. It might sound like overkill, but you can’t be too safe. Better that than risk a bite.”

Rae’s tone is harsh, words falling staccato-fast from her lips. Can’t be the first time she’s said it, but she doesn’t sound exasperated. It’s the best rule and the first we internalise. Kill or be killed.

Autumn’s answering nod is brittle. Her own pale face is pinched with seriousness. I’m glad to see it. “I can do it.”

“I’m sure you can,” Rae replies.

I turn my face back to the window and tune them out.

This far north, the landscape is overgrown.

No one’s tended it for decades. That wildness sweeps off into the distance, a distance I’m still unused to despite all the trips I’ve taken out here.

Feels like I could step off the train and all that emptiness would simply swallow me up.

A breeze blows through the grass, buffering each blade, and I can’t tell if it’s only the wind or if something else lurks out there, lurching towards the metal stagger of the train. We’re moving too quickly. It’s difficult to tell.

Somehow, I doubt it. There’s nothing here for them to sink their teeth into.

The zombies, I mean. The zombies that tore into existence over twenty years ago, when I was only a child.

I tap my fingers against my knee, then rub the rough fabric of my trousers.

Now the initial years of the outbreak feel like a distant nightmare.

Blood and screaming and the desperate, clinging urge to survive…

We made it to the Citadel. My parents and I. Pain flashes through my heart, there and gone in a moment. Rae’s from the city the Citadel was born from. Autumn is too young to have known any other life.

It is safe there. Obedience and the great walls keep us safe. Yet the urge to leave, to take whatever job I can that has me traipsing out into this now-unfamiliar landscape to clear out those remaining zombies still seizes me.

This is the furthest north we’ve ever been.

Yorkshire. I don’t expect we’ll find much.

Other teams have found survivors, but I never have, and every year that passes brings us fewer and fewer zombies.

Clusters remain, starving and rotting, almost pitiful in their weakness, but one day I think we’ll venture out and find nothing at all.

I turn my gaze to Rae and Autumn again. Rae’s axe rests on the seat next to her, handle lacquered, blade sharp.

She uses her hands when she speaks, movements almost as cutting as that blade.

A Black woman about fifteen years older than me, her dark hair is braided close to her scalp, and when Autumn asks her a question, she nods and purses her full lips.

Autumn has a machete, which made Blake outright laugh when she arrived.

She’s perhaps the palest person I’ve seen in years, a hint of red in her dark hair.

It’s tied up in a no-nonsense ponytail, not a wisp escaping around her face.

An orphan, one Citadel trained to be even better than the rest of us.

Except her hand keeps twitching back to the handle of her machete every time the train makes a sound.

She’s not used to it. Any of it. She must have shown some aptitude to be sent on this job with us, but she’s never truly experienced what it’s like to be out from under the Citadel’s thumb, to rely on yourself and your team—

To kill.

The first time was a shock to me, too.

“How much longer?” I ask.

Rae doesn’t smile, not that I’ve ever seen, but her eyes soften when she takes me in. Autumn eyes me with no small amount of wariness. I’ve done nothing to strike up a friendship with her. Why would I? None of us are friends , even if Rae is on most jobs I’m on and helped me through my first, too.

“Half an hour or so. Already antsy?”

I shake my head and stare out the window again.

My baseball bat rests across my thighs, and I force my knee to remain still when it wants to bounce.

I want to be off this train and its scratchy, threadbare seats.

Hunters are the only people who get to use them.

They carry us to our destination, abandon us there, then return to ferry us straight back to the Citadel.

If we don’t make it back on the train, that’s it. No going back.

“Make sure your blade doesn’t get stuck,” Rae says. “You can’t be without a weapon.”

“I know,” Autumn replies. “I—”

She snaps her mouth shut when the door to our carriage is pushed open violently. I don’t look back. I know who’s there. Otto is in the carriage ahead, likely dozing. No one bothers him. There’s no point; he never rises to it.

Dane and Blake want more than that. They’re starving—hungry for attention, to prove they’re the heads of this pack. And Autumn is trembling, easy prey. She tenses as they approach, shrinking back when they stand over her. Rae’s jaw tenses.

“How do you think she’ll do?” Blake asks Dane. His tone drips with condescension. He stands between me and her, and I don’t know if he’s done that on purpose. “I don’t think she’ll last the first day if we come across a decent horde.”

“Oh, I think we’ll help her through that,” Dane says, voice saccharine-sweet. He leans against the seats Autumn is sitting on. Can she see through his smile the way the rest of us can?

Both Dane and Blake are tall, within an inch of each other in height, but that’s where their similarities end.

Dane is white, broad, and there’s an anger deep within him that rolls like an undercurrent, sometimes impossible to see on the surface.

Blake’s skin is a shade or two lighter than my own and he’s built leaner, designed more for vicious speed than pure strength.

He also hates me. Every look he throws me is full of venom, an unspoken threat. Dane unsettles me. He wants to fuck me. That’s clear enough. Or at least he wants me to want it. Wants me to hunger for him.

Blake doesn’t like that, either.

“Those schools should be good for something,” Blake says. “We should leave her to do a watch alone.”

“We’re not doing that,” Rae says, fingers creeping closer to the handle of her axe. I tighten my hold on my bat, metal warming beneath my hand. Once we arrive, we’ll need everyone we can get. That doesn’t mean I’ll hold back here.

“We could leave you out there with her,” Dane says, sweetness souring in his mouth.

“We’re not doing that, either,” I say.

Dane’s shoulders stiffen before he turns to me.

His dark eyes move over me slowly, heavy as a physical caress. My stomach rolls. It would do the same were his hands actually on me. Blake turns too, disgust clear on his face.

“Oh, it was only a joke,” Dane says, honey-sweet again. He’s handsome, of course. That’s the worst part. His face is even, smile quick, not a mark on his features despite all the hunts I know he’s been on.

But his eyes…

They’re empty except for that ravenous hunger that threatens to tear me to pieces. The smile he wears sits rigid on his mouth and doesn’t reach those eyes at all.

“Not a funny one,” I retort.

Blake’s hands curl into fists. Dane’s smile never falters, but the hunger in his eyes flares.

“What a tragic sense of humour you have,” he says eventually. The train is beginning to slow. “I’ll go see how long before we arrive.”

He strides to the door at the opposite end of the carriage, long legs easily eating up the distance, but Blake stays planted where he is. Will Dane bother Otto? Probably not if he’s alone.

Blake continues staring at me, nostrils flaring with each heavy breath.

“Do you want something?” I ask.

“Fuck off, Isaac. I don’t know what you’ve done to Dane, but you need to leave him the fuck alone.”

“I haven’t done a thing to him. You know that.”

“Queer little fuck, thinking you can—”

I rush to my feet and Blake’s mouth snaps shut. I’m not as tall as him or Dane, but I’m stronger than Blake, at least, and besides…

He’s seen me fight.

He’s seen me kill.

“Go after him if you’re that fucking bothered,” I snarl. “We don’t want you here.”

Blake shoots me one last hateful glare before he storms out of the carriage. I stay standing once he’s gone. I don’t want him coming back in here.

“Are you all right?” Rae asks. She stares past me, at the door Dane and Blake just left through. Her knuckles are pale where she’s gripping her axe. She wants to go after them.

“Fine,” I reply, then wonder if she was speaking to Autumn instead. She looks more affected than either of us. Her pale cheeks are stained red, eyes too wide, showing all the whites like a prey animal.

Rae sighs and loosens her grip on her axe before she nods at me. “You?” she asks Autumn.

Autumn nods timidly. She eyes me with even more wariness, shuffling minutely away when I look at her. No point asking why. I drop back into my seat and blow out an explosive breath. I dropped my bat when I stood. No point in risking breaking it on a human head.

My hands tingle with stifled violence. This way would be more satisfying, too.

“Focus,” Rae snaps.

“S-sorry,” Autumn whispers. She should be more concerned that she has Dane’s and Blake’s attention. Of course she won’t be taking a watch alone, but that they’ve picked her out as a plaything, that they’ve already started bothering her—

That should worry her more than whether or not I like to fuck men.

I place my bat back on my knees and force my spine to loosen, leaning back in my seat.

The countryside is still passing us by, and I glare out at the lush green landscape, tuning Rae out.

Takes half a day to get up here, what with how disused the tracks are.

We’ll be a week in the town before we have to go back.

Eight days. In eight days, I’ll be back behind those walls and maybe I’ll have finally earned enough money to move out of my cramped shared quarters in the centre of the Citadel and into some other shoebox of a place where I can at least have some privacy.

Eight days and maybe I’ll be considered senior enough to build my own team, have some say over where I want to go and clear out.

Eight days.

That’s all I have to survive.