Wilson’s original population must have been no more than a thousand or so – smaller than Fraser. Judging by the turnout in the hall, and the number of beds in the crypt directly below, there were only around a hundred of them left.
Once they’d eaten, a skeleton crew remained above ground to clear away the dishes, while the rest of the town descended into the crypt. Lucy made a point of staying above ground to help with the clear-up.
After dinner a handful of adults stood outside the church smoking, eking out the last precious minutes of daylight until a second bell signaled time was up. Lucy watched as the stragglers retreated into the hall, its heavy doors quickly barred behind them.
By now the food stuff had been cleared away, and she and the other cleaners made their way down into the vault while Fiona, the rotund councilor, extinguished the candles in the hall.
Once everyone was inside the vault, two men placed huge timber beams into recently added fittings, which horizontally barred the thick wooden door. The room was secure, but there was no second exit.
Lucy carefully negotiated her way through the rows of people until she reached her previous spot. She climbed into bed without changing her clothes. The few candles illuminating the vault were extinguished in turn until just one remained alight by the entrance.
The room was immensely claustrophobic now that there were almost a hundred bodies crammed inside. It was a jungle of grunts, snores, and shuffles. There was the occasional wave of children crying, as one set off the others. All was compounded by the rising temperature and the cocktail of scents that came to mingle in the cramped, badly ventilated haven.
A few pockets of people chatted among themselves for a couple of hours past the “lights out” time, whispering, laughing, and guffawing, to the frustrated huffs and muttered curses of everyone else. Lucy grimaced each time the sound of someone pissing in a tin pan echoed through the darkness. In that dark, rustling space, every sense was amplified to a torturous degree.
Some of the talkers had clearly been drinking, from the way they laughed, their attempts at whispering, their lewd humor, and their frequent piss-pot visits. Paul had told Lucy that alcohol was prohibited – would he intervene? Or was it another councilor’s job to tell the idiots to just shut up? Lucy felt close to storming over. It was her first proper night in the crypt and cabin fever was already setting in. How were these people surviving down here, together?
As the drunks finally fell asleep, one persistent thought kept Lucy awake: somewhere in the darkness was Matty.
***
“Hold this, will you?” said Paul, thrusting Lucy his jacket as he exited the council’s meeting room the next morning. Lucy had been put on guard duty outside the meeting room. Being an impartial party, she was deemed the most suitable candidate to prevent others from eavesdropping on the deliberations and intervening in any way. The council had taken several hours to reach a verdict, and as Paul passed her now, he looked white as a sheet.
“Who’s gonna do it?” asked Fiona, following closely on his heels. “Who’s actually gonna go through with it, Paul? ’Cos you know I won’t. And neither will half the folk in this town.”
“Then I guess it’ll have to be someone from the other half,” Paul replied, his cheeks sagging as he spoke.
The other councilors came out of the meeting room one by one, all looking equally drained and nauseous. Some had visibly been crying.
Lucy stayed close to Paul and Fiona as they led the way back through the main hall. He was sweating profusely.
“Don, Jerry, please go and retrieve Matty,” instructed Paul as he reached the main entrance. “Andrea, I believe Liam is a pastor. Please ask him to meet us there. Monica, any relatives Matty still has need to be notified. If they want to attend, they’ll need to be there in a half hour.”
The two women departed. Paul exhaled heavily and rubbed his face. “I think I need five minutes. I’ll – excuse me,” he said, rushing back towards the corridor.
Lucy stood, gawping at the deserted hall. The only other council member left – the goateed scribe – had slipped off unnoticed.
As she shifted Paul’s jacket over to her other arm, a jangling noise caught her attention. Lucy threw her eyes around, realizing the significance of that sound. It was now or never; this was her window to escape – to flee the town before it imploded. She couldn’t see any other way out.
She raced back down to the vault and grabbed her backpack, taking care not to disturb the sleeping night-watch crew. Resurfacing, she headed straight onto the street and to Paul’s car. Pulling the keys from his jacket she opened the driver’s door, and started the engine. The tank was half full. She spun the car around and headed towards a long straight road pointing out of Wilson, using all her nerve to keep the car at a steady thirty lest the noise of a roaring engine should draw unwanted attention in the silent town.
As she turned onto the long straight road she passed another car headed the opposite way; it was Andrea, with another man – presumably the pastor. Andrea gawped at Lucy, before blaring the horn and gesturing furiously for Lucy to pull over. Lucy hit the accelerator and climbed up the gears, quickly speeding past sixty with no sign of abating.
The mid-morning sun bounced off the watchtower as Lucy approached the town boundary. She squinted and watched as the guards turned towards the sound of her engine, one raising a pair of binoculars to his face. She leaned back and flipped the sun visor down, keeping her foot pressed against the floor. The red needle trembled above ninety as she hurtled past the bewildered tower. She glanced in her rear-view mirror and watched as the scaffold outpost shrank into the distance. She was free.
FOUR
Pilgrim
_________________________________
Lucy shifted in her seat and peered forward. About half a mile ahead was a roadblock spanning both directions of the highway. She slowed the car, checking her rear-view mirror for signs of pursuit – she’d been driving for less than an hour so there was no guarantee she was in the clear. The residents of Wilson were not afraid of meting out retribution.
She brought the car to a crawl a good quarter mile from the roadblock and scanned the horizon. Something was clearly wrong. There were cones and road-work signs, but no road works. And instead of a police car blocking the central gap, there was a regular silver car. A man climbed out and waved his arms to Lucy, beckoning her to approach.
Lucy slowed the car down to a complete stop and leaned forwards. The man continued to wave, his handlebar moustache protruding out from under his black aviator glasses.
As Lucy squinted, the far door of the silver car opened and a second man got out, holding a rifle. Lucy threw the car into gear and spun the steering wheel around, doing a screeching half-turn. She began to accelerate away from the blockade as fast as possible.
Flinching as shots rang out, she continued climbing the gears while bullets whizzed past her retreating car.
Lucy retraced her route for five minutes then came off at the first exit. With the route blocked by highwaymen, Kansas City was no longer an option. She decided she would have to try to take a detour and bypass the place altogether. At the Salina junction she picked up the deserted Interstate 135 and set off south.
Lucy pressed on with her pedal glued to the floor, anxious to reach the next stopping point before nightfall. If she could track east again, she might be able to circumnavigate Kansas and pick up the route to St. Louis, Missouri. It was reachable in a day. Maybe. But the speed of her driving was taking its toll; the fuel gauge was beginning to run low.
The air was growing hazy. Tiny molecules of carbon made their way through the car’s air vents, filling it with a campfire scent. Within a few minutes the haze had worsened significantly, turning the air a thick, musky brown. Lucy flicked the fog lights on, shifting nervously in her seat.
She slammed on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a rapid halt. Lucy checked her rear-view mirror; the gas station that she’d spotted had vanished from vi
ew again into the haze. Pushing the gear box into reverse she retraced her rubber-burned tracks, reversing quickly up the empty, smog-ridden freeway. The gas station’s tall banner swung into view through the rear window. Lucy steered backwards onto the forecourt and climbed out of the car.
Ash fell through the hazy air like tiny, curled wood shavings. A thin layer of soot was forming across the station’s undisturbed tar. Along from the indolent pumps sat an abandoned car, also being slowly coated in ash.
“Please, please, please,” she muttered.
Lucy reached over and opened the glove compartment where, to her immense relief, Paul’s loaded handgun lay. She tucked it into the back of her jeans as she stepped out the car. She pulled her T-shirt up across her mouth and nose as a makeshift filter.
First, Lucy picked up one of the pump heads, knowing full well it wouldn’t work. She placed it into the car’s tank hole and squeezed. Her heart still sank when her expectations were met. Replacing the nozzle in its holster, she approached the abandoned shop.
The station had been locked up, so she smashed the glass door with the butt of the handgun. Carefully avoiding the shards, she crossed inside.
Almost everything useful had already been taken – presumably by the owners. The smell of rotten egg mayo wafted over from the refrigerator section, where abandoned sandwiches lay festering. Breathing through her mouth, she searched the place for fuel, scouring each shelf multiple times and retracing her steps around the store. After five frustrating laps she accepted that the gas cans had already been taken.
Hands on her hips, cursing, Lucy stared out through the windows onto the forecourt where her eyes fell on the abandoned car. She could siphon the fuel!
She needed some apparatus. Lucy found the store’s cleaning cupboard and propped the door open, allowing the gloomy smog light in. The cupboard was lined with row upon row of detergent and cleaning utensils, as well as some overflow food stock from the main store that, she suspected, should not legally have been stored there. Grabbing a bucket and a pair of scissors, Lucy returned to the forecourt. She walked via the manual car wash where she cut the hose off from one of the pressure cleaners.
Returning to the abandoned car, she knelt beside it and opened the fuel cap. She unscrewed the cap and fed the hose into the tank. The pungent smell of gasoline cloyed her nostrils. Placing the exposed tip into her mouth, she sucked, hard, drawing the noxious liquid up from the tank. It hit her tongue without warning, rancid flecks of gasoline flying into the back of her mouth. Spluttering and coughing, she retched and spat to the side, shoving the hose head down into the bucket below as the gasoline trickled out.
She had to do five trips with the bucket, cursing and retching as she kick-started the transfusion process, decanting the load into her own car each time it filled, until at last the abandoned vehicle was empty. It wasn’t a full tank’s worth, but it might keep her going until the next gas station.
Only once back on the road did Lucy realize how lucky she’d been; if that car had run on a different fuel to her own, she’d have been completely stranded.
It was midday and the smog was almost impenetrable; the opaque orange-brown hues enveloped her car completely. She’d been forced to drop her speed down to about forty miles an hour, which was still too fast for the conditions, but she was racing nightfall. She tried scanning the radio frequencies again but found only white noise.
Stress was beginning to cloud her judgement, while fear played tricks on her vision. Figures formed and dissolved in the blink of an eye as the smog churned. The changes in lighting cast shadows that her panicked mind sculpted into beast silhouettes, each immediately erased by fresh haze.
Lucy’s voice was tired. She’d been shouting for quite some time; cursing the ether at the top of her lungs, pounding the redundant sun visor of her tin fortress. She raged at everything from the beasts, to the troops, to the government, to Dan, demanding answers from the silence around her and receiving only the steady rumble of the road beneath.
She wouldn’t admit it to herself, but she no longer had a plan. She’d barely had one when she fled Wilson, and now she was completely lost. The appalling visibility only compounded her sense of isolation.
“Fuck you! Fuck you!” she yelled at a passing speed restriction sign. “One hundred? One hundred? OK, fuckin’ A! Let’s all do one hundred!” she shouted, slamming her pedal to the floor. The car’s rumble turned to a growl as it began to race down the opaque road, Lucy’s anger rising with the speed.
A hazy figure appeared up ahead and Lucy broke off her rant, squinting to focus on the object. The signals from her brain departed too late; her pupils dilated wide in horror as she realized what was happening. Her foot barely touched the brakes as the car crunched into the wild animal. The stag’s dense bone structure shattered the right headlight, sending the car careering off into the roadside. Lucy smashed through a wooden fence, juddering down a grassy embankment. The sudden braking locked the wheels but couldn’t undo the momentum, and the car skidded across a muddy verge, ploughing through the brown haze until with a crunch it landed in a shallow brook, the bedrock finally halting the vehicle’s progress. The dying whines of the engine faded out as the babbling of the water underneath began to register with Lucy’s dazed mind.
The airbag had deployed and Lucy pawed it away from her face, winded. She felt her body; nothing new seemed broken, and she couldn’t see or feel any bleeding anywhere. But a tingling drew her mind downwards; cold water was fast seeping into the car. The pedals were half-submerged already. Lucy coiled her legs up towards her chest as she fumbled with the safety belt.
The car was at an angle, its partially submerged nose tilting downward by about thirty degrees. Water intermittently splashed up onto the cracked windscreen while more continued to pool in the footwell. Grabbing her backpack from the front passenger side as the water flowed in, she threw it into the rear of the car and followed, climbing between the front two seats into the back.
The rear was just about still over dry land and Lucy pushed the nearside door open, flinging the backpack out onto the mud and grass and clambering after it. She collapsed onto the cold, damp riverbank and sat there for a moment to recover. The car was wrecked, and it was four p.m. By her calculations, that meant she wasn’t even halfway to St. Louis.
She gazed at the mud tracks she’d carved across the embankment. The road itself was completely obscured by the thick, choking air. There was no sign of the injured stag; perhaps it was still alive, slowly bleeding to death. Whatever blood it may have spilled on the car was being cleansed by the river now.
Breathing through her T-shirt, Lucy stood up and slowly retraced the car’s tracks. The grassy verge seemed a lot steeper and longer now that she was on foot. Eventually, she reached the spot where she’d burst through the wooden fence, which stretched out either side of her into the smog. Blood decorated the road where the unsuspecting stag had been struck, but there was no body to be found. The only clue to its fate was a trail of blood droplets leading off in the opposite direction to the car, across the far lane and into the mist.
Lucy returned to the flooded car and stared, grimly. She was lost, completely, and had no means of transport. Looking up ahead, something flickered through the haze. But it was gone in a split second. She shut her eyes and recalled what she’d just seen: the unmistakable triangular peak of an old-fashioned farmhouse. She opened her eyes and stared across the river, but the fleeting peak remained obscured by dark orange smog.
The water wasn’t too fast-moving. It looked to be about two feet deep, with a rocky bedding. The far bankside was mostly visible; it must have been about eight yards away from the car.
Lucy kept her boots on to protect against sharp stones. Rolling up her jeans, she took two cautious steps into the water. It was freezing cold. Her boots immediately soaked through and began sapping the heat from her lower half. She swayed slightly as the stones shifted beneath her, the weight of the backpack destabilizing her fu
rther. One step at a time, she edged across the freezing brook, gasping as the water rushed above her kneecaps and up her thighs, splashing her torso as she stepped. It was deeper than she’d estimated.
She reached the other side and scrambled up the bank, trying all the while to keep herself on a straight course from the car. The swirling mist parted again for a brief second and she got a second glimpse of the triangular peak; the house was real. Rolling her jeans back down to try to retain whatever heat she could from her shivering legs, she scrambled up the new bankside and over a small mound, descending onto a field.
Despite the nearness of the river, the soil felt dry and dusty underfoot, clumps of it crumbling beneath her wet feet as she passed through the small, arid crop field. Ash was sticking to the slimy, unharvested vegetables that lay rotting in the ground.
“Hello?” she called out, following the gravel driveway around to the front of the house, casting her eyes around for signs of the owners as she approached a pristine pastel-blue front door. The three wooden steps up to the door creaked slightly underfoot, her muddy feet making a patting sound on the painted white beams. She lifted the insect-door latch and entered the wood-decked porchway. Reaching the blue front door, she lifted the heavy iron knocker, striking three times, and calling out several times more. No one answered. She tried the handle. Locked. She tried turning it once again, more forcefully this time, but the door stood firm. Lucy’s eyes fell to the doormat beneath her feet: a thick, tan-colored rectangle with the words Home is where the dog is printed onto its coarse fibers, along with a drawing of a snarling Dobermann.
Backing up, she began to search the surroundings for a spare key, checking every obvious place in turn: under the coir doormat, under a pot containing a dried-out dead plant, taped under the dusty windowsills, hidden in the recently painted wooden trellising – anywhere that could potentially harbor a spare. It took less than two minutes to find the partially rusted piece of metal she needed lying under a smooth decorative stone at the end of the wooden porch.
Convulsive Box Set Page 23
