Ted twisted the key to start the engine, but instead of rumbling to life, an unhealthy ticking emanated from beneath the bonnet. The dashboard lights flickered but were unable to claw themselves to life. “Come on, damn it!” He twisted the key back and forth, again and again. All he could summon though was that mocking tick-tick-tick. He pounded the dashboard with his fists. “Bastard!”
“Sounds like the battery.” The soldier stood at his window, arms resting on top of her rifle. “Pop the hood, and I’ll have a nose.”
Ted shoved the door open and nearly hit her. “I’ll handle it myself.”
“What the hell is your problem? I’m only trying to…” She trailed off as something captured her attention. Staring grimly at the front of Ted’s truck, she muttered to herself, “Ah shite.”
“What? What is it?” Ted bustled his way past and stood in front of his van. For a moment, he didn’t understand what he was seeing, just a ragged puncture in the side of his bonnet. Then he realised. “You shot my bleedin’ engine, you daft cow!”
The soldier apologised profusely, but Ted wasn’t interested. He shut her up with a stern shove, sending her backwards by several steps. His anger took hold of him, and he had to turn away to keep from losing control. The soldier’s reaction took a few seconds. At first, she stood there looking stupefied, but then her face creased in anger. Thankfully, she didn’t point her rifle at him. “You’ve got a screw loose, mate.”
“I’m not your mate!”
“Damn right, you ain’t. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up my enemy.”
Ted sneered. “And then you’ll shoot me, right? Go ahead, luv. I’m passed giving a monkey’s.”
“What? Of course I won’t shoot you. I don’t shoot people for being arseholes. You’d have to try a lot harder.”
“Whatever,” said Ted. “Just bugger off, okay? I don’t like company. I just… I just want to be left alone.”
The soldier kept her hands at her sides, and the angry expression drained from her face. She seemed to chew on something for a moment, then looked at him with pity. “My name’s Hannah, okay? Hannah Weber. I’m sorry about your truck, but when I saw you surrounded by dees, I was more concerned with dropping bodies than picking my shots. At such a short range, my rounds would have gone in and out. Let me look under the bonnet, okay? I might be able to find a workaround.”
Ted knew his way around an engine, but other than identifying the obvious, he had no specific skill. As a soldier, this bird—Hannah—might know how to fix what was broken better than him. He laid his hammer across the truck’s front seats, then pulled the lever under the steering column. The bonnet hopped two inches and Hannah went over to it, lifting it all the way and propping it open with the shaft. “Here’s your battery,” she said, pointing.
Ted rolled his eyes. “I know what a battery looks like.”
Hannah shook her head and whispered something under her breath which he assumed wasn’t a compliment. She undid the terminals on the battery and removed the contacts, then lifted the cell out of its housing. It was clearly beyond saving. The bullet had entered the left side but hadn’t come out the right—lodged somewhere in the unit’s gooey centre. A thin, clear liquid leaked from the hole, and an acrid odour irritated Ted’s eyes as he leant over the engine. He stepped back and grunted a litany of obscenities.
Hannah turned to him, a pained look on her face. “I’m really sorry, mate.”
“Ted,” he said, sighing as his curse words ran dry and left him utterly deflated.
“Huh?”
“My name is Ted. Look, I’m sorry I shoved you. My temper, it’s.... It’s not what it used to be.” He ran his hands through his thinning brown barnet and looked up at the darkening sky. Night approached. “Sodding ‘ell!”
Hannah warily offered her hand. “Nice to meet you, Ted. Wish it were under cannier circumstances. Tell you the truth, I was wondering if I’d ever see another person.”
“There’s still a handful about if you search enough, but there’s less and less every day. I ain’t seen a soul in a couple days now, not since some family in a clapped-out camper van heading south on the highway. They were moving at a fair old nick, so I don’t think they were leaving anything good behind them.”
“Do you know if there’s anywhere people are heading? Any camps, safe places?”
Ted frowned. “You’re the squaddie. Shouldn’t you know better than me?”
“You’re right, but it never hurts to ask. There’s nowhere safe I know of. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what? I ain’t searching for safety.”
Hannah rubbed at her forehead, perplexed. “Then where are you…?”
Ted sighed. He’d lowered his guard more than he’d intended to already. This Hannah seemed a decent enough sort, but he still wanted to get back on the road, alone and moving. “It don’t matter,” he said. “Nothing matters anymore.”
Tellingly, the soldier didn’t argue. She stared at the floor and breathed out slowly. Both knew the hopelessness of their situation. The demons had invaded the world from several thousand locations at once, making any attempts at an organised defence impossible. Ted was no military strategist, but before the televisions had stopped working, he’d garnered enough to know the enemy had obliterated humanity before it even realised it was under attack. The demons hadn’t come for war, they’d come to behead mankind with one swoop of a sword.
Ted reached into his truck and pulled something out of the glove compartment. He thought about shoving it into the small rucksack he kept on the passenger seat but slid it into his jeans instead to keep it close. He slung the rucksack over his shoulder and gathered up his hammer before starting up the road. The breeze seemed to whisper threats, but he ignored them.
Hannah called after him. “Where are you going?”
“North.”
5
DR KAMIYO
For the first time in his life, Dr Christopher Kamiyo had no idea where he was going. As a child, he’d accounted for every minute of every day far into the future. He’d known which college he’d attend by the age of ten, and which university by the age of twelve. Informed decision-making was the crux of his existence. That was what his parents had demanded of him.
Now, Kamiyo was sitting at the side of the road in mismatched shoes while bleeding from his left ankle—a prize for climbing over a barbed-wire fence. He fingered a glob of super-glue taken from his rucksack into the two-inch gash and hissed at the resulting sting. Fixing himself up was becoming a regular occurrence, and he envisioned a future where he casually popped his eyeballs back in his skull or stitched up his own intestines. The world had become a jagged place, and every corner waited to cut you.
His travels had taken him north, almost as far as Scotland. He’d spent so long keeping to the fields and side-roads it was hard to know for sure where he was, but he had at least zeroed it down to the county of Northumberland. In the early days of the demon invasion, he’d hidden out in the apartment building where he lived with several other junior doctors and staff. A safe place, inhabited by colleagues and familiar faces, but when the riots began, the building gradually bled its inhabitants. A pair of residents went out for supplies and never returned, a group of nurses packed bags and made a dash for safer climes, while a newly qualified anaesthetist hanged herself from the stairwell with IV tubing. Things only got more desperate after that.
Kamiyo’s parents lived in London, which was part of the reason he’d taken a position in Manchester two-hundred miles away. Both cardiologists, his parents had been absent and overbearing in equal measure, yet he missed them now. He knew he’d never see them again. London might as well be Timbuktu. Or Mars. His mother hadn’t hugged him since childhood, but he would give anything to collapse into her arms again someday.
Did I make them proud before everything went sideways? Or will I never get the chance?
When the invasion began—hordes of demons spilling out from those bizarre gates—train
s skidded to a halt and planes stalled beside runways. Motorways became snarled war zones. The country disintegrated in a matter of days, and everybody found themselves locked-in place and surrounded by chaos. There was nowhere to run, and no way to get there. The invasion spread and spread, and soon Kamiyo’s apartment building stopped being a sanctuary and started resembling a tomb.
Twelve had remained inside when the demons first arrived. The monsters swarmed the streets like locusts, picking clean the flesh of anything living. Kamiyo and the other survivors watched in horror from a third-floor window while people were dragged from shop fronts and other hiding places. A mother with a baby locked herself inside the boot of an old Volvo but was promptly discovered and torn apart. The demons tossed her baby into the gutter like old fish and chip paper. As a maternity doctor, Kamiyo had seen dead babies before, but that image had replayed itself in his mind every night since. Even as he thought about it now, it placed him right back into the nightmare of that day.
No one had escaped the killing. A man in an unravelling turban had made it as far as a Ford Ranger, and nearly got away after mowing down half-a-dozen demons in his path, but then he had careened into a laundrette’s plate-glass window and slumped against the steering wheel. A monster covered in burns dragged the man out and snapped his neck.
“Come on!” Sonja had urged Kamiyo during that time they’d watched the horror from the windows. Sonja was a pretty nurse from Oncology who lived in the building, and Kamiyo had often wondered if there was a spark between them. Now he’d never find out.
“We have to run,” Sonja had begged him, “before they find us.”
Kamiyo had agreed, but a registrar from Plastics argued against, making it clear he would take his chances staying put. A nurse and a senior administrator vowed to remain as well. That left nine people willing to make a run for it, and of those nine, only Kamiyo ever made it farther than a single block. Sonja had called out to him as demons peeled strips of flesh from her body, but he hadn’t turned back to help her.
That Kamiyo was still alive now, weeks later, astonished him, but it left tomorrow a blur, like coming up from his parent’s swimming pool with chlorine in his eyes.
There appeared to be three main types of demon. There were what he thought of as the ‘burn victims’, who seemed to make up the bulk of the demon army—walking and moving like human beings, but so mortally wounded they couldn’t possibly be alive. They attacked without pause.
Secondly, there were the apes. He called them that because they loped about on all-fours, leaping and bouncing like chimpanzees. They were the least human-looking and attacked with terrifying ferocity.
Finally, were the zombies—the most human-looking, but rotting like the horror film staple to which he compared them. Unlike the other two types of demon, the zombies were—ironically—the smartest. They could talk and think and often acted with intent. They did not attack without pause, and appeared to be the ones who called the shots.
He avoided all three types.
Kamiyo heard rumours of other types of monstrosities back in the days before the internet had fallen and people had still gathered to share news and supplies. The last time he’d seen another person now was four days ago—a hairy biker riding an American-style chopper with a crossbow on his back. The man slowed down to eye Kamiyo, but decided the introduction wasn’t worth it and sped on by, his dirty hair flapping in the wind and a pair of angel wings on his dirty denim jacket. Where are the angels now? Kamiyo had asked himself at the time.
He’d never been a religious man—both parents were atheists—but he feared he may have been wrong about the whole thing. Hell had invaded Earth, and that proved there was more to existence than Science understood. Did that mean Kamiyo had devoted his life to a fallacy? Was Science a false path?
No, I devoted my life to healing people. That isn’t a waste.
In the pulpy science fiction novels he’d secretly binged on as a teenager, doctors had always been a part of the hero’s group. Healers were the good guys. Yet, since the demons came, Kamiyo had not helped a single soul. Instead, he’d watched people die by the thousands with no hope of medical intervention. You couldn’t staunch blood from a torn-up abdomen with no operating room or team of surgeons. Out here, medicine was impotent. That deadbeat on the chopper was more capable in this new reality than Kamiyo. Part of him wondered if he should have died outside his apartment building with the others instead of running. His cowardice had got eight other people killed regardless of whether or not he had meant it. Pushing Sonja aside to shield himself had not been an intentional act. It had been instinctual. But it still made him a murderer. He would always be a murderer—and a coward.
When the demons had spotted them leaving the apartment building, a sudden jolt of abject fear had seized Kamiyo’s higher functions and left a caveman in charge. When an ape-like monster leapt at him from behind a Volkswagen, he had shoved Sonja into its path without thinking. His survival instincts kicked in and protected him, even at the expense of someone else’s life. The memory of it sickened him.
And yet, he was still alive when everybody else was dead.
Kamiyo gathered his rucksack and started walking, and it wasn’t long before he spotted something in the distance he valued—a large home. One might assume petrol stations and supermarkets the jewels in the apocalyptic desert, but most were looted early on. You’d be lucky nowadays to find a tube of toothpaste or unused toilet paper. No, Kamiyo had stayed alive these last few weeks by raiding rich people’s homes.
Well-defended and secure, the owners had typically stayed put during the early days of the invasion. Furthermore, the largest homes were rurally situated. It meant they’d avoided any damage from the mass riots and arson of the towns and cities. Despite all that, the wealthy only held out so long before running out of food or being exterminated by roving gangs of demons. Now the big houses were empty—mansions and cottages ripe for the picking. A house last week even had power, drawn from solar panels on the roof. He’d spent the night kicking back, playing Fable on a dusty old Xbox. It had seemed like Heaven, and he only left because the place was empty of food and water. You had to keep moving to keep living.
Kamiyo approached this latest house with a near-swagger, so used to the apocalyptic-procedure by now he had little to fear. He would enter through a back door, out of view of the road, and re-supply himself with whatever he found inside, perhaps staying a while if it suited him. The house was a modern dwelling, probably custom-built for some businessman or other. While it possessed brick foundations like a majority of UK houses, it also featured a great amount of wood, making it more akin to an American farmhouse, or the New England colonial property his parents had owned in Maine. Whitewashed wood panelling covered the brickwork beneath a large triangular roof, and a balcony jutted out beneath a pair of elevated French doors.
In the rear garden, Kamiyo discovered a cavernous workshop and a large shed, both unlocked. A chainsaw hung inside the workshop on a large hook and Kamiyo grabbed that first. In his previous life as a registrar on a maternity ward, he never would have dreamed of firing up a chainsaw like Ash from the Evil Dead or something, but nowadays, power tools were the first thing he sought. Like a pro, he fired up this chainsaw now with confidence, and he carried it towards the house. When he got there, he sank the spinning blade into the back door, cutting around the hinges in two neat semi-circles. The door was still snug in the frame, so he had to yank it three times before it came free.
Open sesame.
A familiar stench met him.
That Kamiyo found the home owner dead in the kitchen was not a shock—it was to be expected more often than not—yet this particular scene took him by surprise. The deceased gentleman lay sprawled face down on the kitchen tiles. There was no blood. Kamiyo presumed an overdose, and again that wasn’t an anomaly, but what was out of the ordinary were the two Alsatians rolled up beside him, and the fluffy white cat next to his head. All three animals were uninjur
ed too, yet also dead awhile. The home owner had presumably dosed his pets so they would die alongside him. A kind gesture—or selfish? Who was to say? Kamiyo had not seen the demons show much interest in animals, so the owner might have released them into the wild to fend for themselves. They might have been fine. Or they might not have.
As a child, Kamiyo had begged for a puppy, especially when it had become clear he would not get a sibling. The response had always been a firm, decisive no. Two working parents, and a host of after-school clubs for Kamiyo, meant no one at home to care for a hound, which were filthy animals anyway, said his father. Childhood had been the loneliest time, and a dog might have changed that. A loving lick to send him to sleep each night might have filled his head with pleasant dreams instead of mundane nightmares of schoolwork and piano lessons. What kind of man would he have been if his parents had given him a dog in his formative years? Did such things change a person? He wondered what the grizzly scene in the kitchen would look like if the home owner didn’t have pets.
Kamiyo moved on through the hallway and into the lounge, feet sinking into its plush carpet. A granite fireplace dominated the room, and an enormous television hung above its mantlepiece, an obsidian slate reflecting the room like a dark mirror. What Kamiyo wouldn’t give to sprawl on the room’s sumptuous sofa and spend an evening in front of Netflix. He’d much prefer watching an apocalyptic drama than living through one. If he’d known civilisation was due to end a year before his thirtieth birthday, he wouldn’t have spent so much time building a career. He’d put off living—travelling, romance, drugs and alcohol—for the promise of a better tomorrow. But now there was no tomorrow, and there’d never be a chance to experience any of what he’d missed.
I’ll never find out how Game of Thrones ends.
In the house’s front reception, Kamiyo located a spacious cloakroom, and scrounged a thick, padded coat and scarf. The weather was turning chilly, Summer at an end, so his current black denim jacket was fast becoming inadequate. He also took some woollen gloves, which he placed inside his rucksack. Finally, knowing no other choice existed, he took himself back into the kitchen. The sight of the homeowner and pets was still heartrending, even upon second viewing, but he needed to search for food. He had remained well-fed so far, but increasingly he was finding food spoiled or pilfered by animals. Before long, he feared he would have to learn how to hunt—if he lived long enough that is.
Hell on Earth- the Complete Series Box Set Page 85
