The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow

by Collingbourne, Huw

  I knocked on the doors to Geoff’s and Leila’s rooms but there was no answer so I looked inside. The rooms were empty. Smith’s room was empty too. For an irrational moment I thought they might have left without me – left, departed, got away, scarpered, skedaddled, as Smith might have said.

  In fact, they were downstairs, stuffing their faces in the restaurant. On the menu this morning were bowls of Cornflakes topped off with lashings of tinned evaporated milk. Once upon a time I would have found it disgusting. That morning, it was delicious.

  We sat by the big windows and watched the almost-empty motorway. I say “almost empty” because there were a few vehicles that went past. There were one or two cars and even one big lorry – the sort that once upon a time carried freight to and from countries all over Europe. I tried to imagine what sort of person would be driving one of those now. I was pretty certain that no cross-channel ferries were in operation and I doubted whether the Channel Tunnel could have been operational. Maybe the Government, if there really was still a Government, had commandeered lorries to mobilise the great recovery operation? The thought was comforting even if improbable.

  I still hoped that there would be a chance of making contact with other people – people like us – that we might, one day, be able to get together and form a bigger group. Find a small town to inhabit, get things working again. But most people were suspicious of us. And we were suspicious of them. So, for the time being, it was just me, Geoff, Leila and Bobby.

  “You are still set on Cambridge, son?” Smith asked.

  “We have to aim for somewhere,” I said, “Cambridge seems as good as anywhere.”

  “You can come with us if you like,” Leila said. I could have throttled her. The Land Rover was overcrowded as it was. I didn’t fancy trying to cram in another person. Especially not one who smelled the way Smith smelled.

  “I am most grateful for the offer,” he replied grandly, “But I must decline. Cambridge is a place which I particularly wish to avoid. Memories, you know. I have many fond memories. And some other memories of a more recent vintage which are not so agreeable.”

  The silence of the morning was suddenly shattered by the low, thrumming rumble of an approaching motorbike. Glancing out of the window, I was surprised to see a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide pulling into the car park. I knew it was an Electra Glide because I’d once been taken to see an old 1970s film called ‘Electra Glide In Blue’. It was my friend, Justin, who’d dragged me along to that. He had an endless fascination for those old films: Easy Rider, The French Connection, Magnum Force – he’d dragged me along to see all of them. I hadn’t liked the films all that much, to tell you the truth, but I’d ended up with a surprisingly wide-ranging knowledge of 1970s American police motorbikes and I knew that the Electra Glide was considered to be a classic.

  So fascinated was I to see the Electra Glide that it took me a few seconds to give my attention to the man who was riding it. He was dressed in black leather in the classic style, by which I mean a Schott biker’s jacket, the sort with little loops on the shoulders, zips all over the place and a buckled belt at the waist. He was wearing a decidedly retro crash helmet: one of those hemispherical pudding-bowl affairs with a black leather chinstrap; and goggles instead of the more conventional built-in visor. Clinging to the lip beneath the goggles was a thin, David Niven-style moustache.

  “Shit,” said Geoff. His economy of words was, on this occasion, entirely justified. At the sight of that tall, black-leather-clad, David Niven-moustached form slowly dismounting his classic bike, removing his pudding-bowl helmet, looping its chin-strap over the bike’s mirrors then, with the index fingers of both hands, carefully smoothing out his moustache, Geoff’s exclamation was about as appropriate as anything I could think of.

  Smith stared at me with eyes wide open, “I can give him both barrels with my gun, if that’s what’s called for, son.”

  “He may be friendly,” I said.

  “Best to be sure,” said Smith, holding the sapphire-blue imitation Glock in his mittened hands.

  “I would be prepared to attempt to make a few friendly overtures,” said Leila, “This biker has a sense of style that appeals to me.”

  “Leila fancies him,” sniggered Geoff.

  But Leila had already left our table and was moving through the foyer towards the main doors. The rest of us were hot on her tail. We met our leather-clad visitor in the wasteland of broken glass and discarded books mid-way between Martha’s Coffee & Muffins and the destroyed newsagent’s shop.

  I was by no means as eager to make his acquaintance as Leila was. While the man might not be infected, there was no reason to believe that he had our best interests at heart either. He might be a looter, or a killer. He could be a rapist, or a sadist. As far as we knew he might be the outrider for a motorbike gang that would make the Hell’s Angels look like a bunch of lily-livered softies.

  “Good morning,” said our visitor. He spoke in a pleasant baritone voice that sounded rather like the late Richard Burton, “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”

  “No, not all,” said Leila, smiling vivaciously.

  “I thought you might like to know that there are some hostiles approaching and I would strongly recommend…”

  “Hostiles?” I said. I wasn’t sure what he meant. The term had a vaguely military sound about it.

  “Possibly you call them ‘Infected’?” he suggested.

  Our various reactions showed that we knew that term well enough.

  “Yes, well, it has not yet been confirmed that an infection is the primary cause of the problem. We prefer to use the term ‘hostiles’. But it amounts to the same thing.”

  “We?”

  “The CDC.” – We gave him a blank stare – “The Civilian Defence Corps.”

  “Bloody Home Guard, you mean?” said Smith.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I knew a chap worked in the CDC back in the ’60s,” Smith said, “He’d been in the Home Guard during the war, so he claimed. Lieutenant or something. Jumped-up little twerp, he was. As far as I could see, the CDC is just full of jobsworths and busybodies.”

  “Ah, you are labouring under a misapprehension. You are thinking of the Civil Defence Corps which was disbanded many years ago. Quite a different organisation from the Civilian Defence Corps.”

  “They were a lot of pompous busybodies back then and from what I can see,” Smith fixed the man with a gimlet stare, “nothing much has changed.”

  “Yes, well, er,” the man smiled sheepishly which, if you’ve ever seen a sheep smile, you’ll realise is not much of a smile at all, “We can but do our best. The thing is, we were a somewhat hush-hush organisation. Before the catastrophe. But now, of course, we aren’t. I thought you might have heard of us.”

  “Not a thing,” I said.

  “Well, now you have. Captain Timms-Martin,” he extended a leather-gloved hand to me; Leila shook it. She had homed in on the hand before it had had a chance to find its intended target. Leila was wearing her dark glasses, I noticed. To avoid awkward questions, no doubt.

  “Are you the Army, like, then?” Geoff asked.

  “In a manner of speaking, I suppose one might say so,” Captain Timms-Martin’s answer struck me as oddly imprecise.

  “’Cos, I’d have thought if you was in the Army you’d have been riding a Triumph or an Armstrong or something. Not a bleedin’ Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.”

  “Ah, the bike. You noticed? Yes well, it was requisitioned, don’t you know.”

  “Requisitioned?” said Geoff.

  “Stolen,” Smith said in a loud stage-whisper.

  “Acquired,” Captain Timms-Martin said, “For the duration of hostilities. We are doing our best to work towards the restoration of order and the repair of infrastructure as speedily as possible, you see.”

  “And how much order and infrastructure has been restored and repaired so far?” asked Smith.

  Captain Timms-Martin gave a w
ry smile, which was somewhat more successful than his sheepish one. “It’s early days, but we have to start somewhere. Now, as I was saying, some hostiles have been observed heading this way. We would therefore strongly advise that you vacate the building, and the surrounding area, at your earliest opportunity.”

  “How many are there?” I asked.

  “Oh, a couple of hundred, I should say.”

  “How far away?”

  “About three miles. They are on foot and progressing at a rate of about two to three miles an hour, I would estimate. So I really would recommend most strongly that you leave immediately. Would there happen to be a convenience here, by any chance? It’s been quite a long ride and…”

  I pointed to the far end of the foyer. “Down there. But there’s no water.”

  “Oh, that’s quite all right. I’m used to that.”

  As he walked off, I said what all of us were thinking. “Do you think we can trust him?”

  “The Civilian Defence Corps could be anything,” said Smith, “Or nothing. How can we be sure he’s even on our side?”

  “I think he’s making it all up,” Geoff said, “If he was part of an official unit he’d be dressed like a soldier, wouldn’t he?”

  “Well, I trust him,” said Leila.

  Geoff and I groaned.

  “No! No! Not there!” Smith suddenly shouted at the top of his voice.

  We stared at him, uncomprehending.

  “That bloke just went into the Ladies’ toilets,” he explained.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, “I hardly think that matters.”

  “Oh, but it does.”

  From the direction of the Ladies’ toilets came the sound of something heavy falling to the ground with a reverberating thump. This was followed immediately by an impressive list of obscenities shouted with great vigour in a rich, baritone voice.

  We looked at Smith. He looked at us. “You remember I said I’d laid a few booby traps,” he mumbled, “Well…”

  21

  We were stuck in the back of the Land Rover – me, Smith and Bobby – with Geoff driving and Leila in the passenger seat. We were following the route that Captain Timms-Martin had suggested, down the A421, south of Bedford, in the Cambridge direction.

  “It was a sack of tinned fruit,” Smith explained, “I’d filled the sack with tins to give it a good weight and then I got a step ladder and I climbed up and wedged it over the door to the Ladies’ conveniences. It took me hours to get it right..”

  “Where’d you get that daft idea?” Geoff shouted (he had to shout to be heard over the noise of the Land Rover).

  “The Dandy, I think. Or maybe The Beano?”

  “The what?”

  “Comics,” I explained for Geoff’s benefit. It’s what kids used to do for entertainment before computers.”

  “You could have killed the poor chap,” Leila protested.

  “Yes,” Smith was smiling broadly.

  I had been hoping that Smith would have declined Leila’s offer of a lift. He had previously been emphatic that the one place among all others that he was most eager to avoid was Cambridge. However, when we gave him the choice of staying alone in the service station to face an advancing army of several hundred homicidal maniacs or roughing it in the back of a Land Rover on the way to the pleasant environs of England’s most beautiful old university, he didn’t hesitate for a second. Cambridge it was!

  I kept the windows open to try to mitigate the heady odour of Smith but it wasn’t having much effect. “It’s a bit pongy in here,” Smith complained once, “The dog, I suppose? You should put butter on his paws.”

  “That’s to stop cats wandering,” Leila said.

  “My dear young lady,” Smith replied haughtily, “there are no cats present so I fail to see the relevance.”

  If the roads had been clear we could have done the journey in under an hour. But the road was blocked by a mess of crashed cars at a place called Little Barsford and we had to backtrack and take some minor roads up to Eaton Socon and St. Neots. As with all the wrecks we saw on the roads, we were never sure what might have been the cause. I wondered at times if some of the crashes had been deliberate; if some joy rider, seeing the world dying, had decided to go out with one final, maniacal act of carnage.

  And then, later on, we came up against a great ridge of concrete rubble blocking the road. It was the remains of a pedestrian bridge. Someone had blown it up. It must have taken a good deal of planning and a hefty explosive to cause so much damage. Why would anyone do that? The only reason I could think of would be to make a barrier to prevent people from driving further along the road. If that had been the aim, it was completely successful. We had to take a detour that must have added another thirty minutes to our journey. By the time we arrived on the edges of Cambridge, it was already twilight.

  The approaches to the town were nondescript. We could have been in a suburb of almost any small town in England. There were little grey houses and bland little shops. The streets were littered with broken glass and rubbish. There were a few bodies too. The place had an air of bleak desolation.

  We were about to turn left down a street when Geoff suddenly made a sharp U-turn to take us back the way we had come. I saw the reason before I’d even had time to ask him what he was doing. An armoured car pulled out of the street which we had almost turned down. It had a searchlight mounted on top and it appeared to be on patrol. We didn’t know what it was looking for. But we were glad it hadn’t found us.

  Geoff drove more cautiously after that. He avoided the main roads into town, preferring to keep to small roads that ran through housing estates and industrial areas. It dawned on me then that we had no idea what we were heading towards. We’d come to Cambridge because the Colonel had told us that the Government had relocated there. I suppose I’d assumed that meant that there was some semblance of civilization there, that law and order reigned and basic services like electricity and water had been restored. So far there had been no sign of that. The streets were as dark and decrepit as they had been in London. More so, in fact. Though that was probably due to the fact that several weeks had elapsed since we’d left London. At least there was no sign of any gangs. Apart from the armoured car, in fact, there was no sign of anyone at all. I remembered the massacre we’d stumbled into at Chalk Farm in North London, when the tanks had rounded up a crowd into the entrance of the tube station and had then opened fire. Was that how law and order was being restored in Cambridge too? I wondered if that was why the streets around us were devoid of any sign of life. But when we got closer to town things changed.

  We were going down a long, dismal road when suddenly a group of young people lurched out in front of us. Our headlights weren’t on and we nearly drove right into them. Geoff slammed on the brakes.

  “What the…!” Smith grabbed hold of me.

  Bobby put his paws on the back of Geoff’s seat and began barking.

  “Accelerate, for God’s sake!” Leila said.

  “No,” I yelled. I remembered the previous occasion when we’d ploughed into a band of red-eyes, that night after we’d been to the cocktail bar. The memory of that filled me with horror. I had no intention of repeating it. “Turn around, can’t you? Drive away?”

  But Geoff did nothing. He sat immobile. He was staring at the group of young people. They were staring back at him. Eventually, Geoff said, “They’re OK. I don’t think they’re dangerous.”

  “You don’t think…!”

  “Look,” he said, “They’re moving away.”

  He was right. Very slowly and cautiously, the young people were walking back in the direction from which they’d come. As they did so, they kept a close eye on the Land Rover. They looked at us in the way you might look at a mad bull that you had unexpectedly encountered in a field, retreating while doing your best not to antagonise it.

  “Are they afraid of us?” I said.

  “I think so,” Geoff answered.

  I had assumed
they were infected, mainly because of their age and the fact that they were wandering through the streets at night. But now I wasn’t so sure. It was almost fully dark so I couldn’t see them clearly. There were four of them: three men and one woman. They were, at a guess, somewhere between eighteen and twenty years of age. All of them had that pale, dishevelled look that I associated with the red-eyes. But they gave every appearance of behaving rationally. They seemed to be talking quietly to one another. They showed no sign of the wild, animal ferocity which we’d seen in previous encounters with red-eyes. All in all, there was something very strange about them. And something very familiar. I realised, with shock, that they reminded me very strongly of Leila.

  Leila had noticed the similarity too. “I’ll go and talk to them,” she said.

  “No!” I grabbed for her shoulder but she shrugged off my grasp and was out through the Land Rover door before I could do anything to stop her. By that time, the gang of four had gone; a gated entrance stood to our left and they had run through the gate to get away. I opened the back door of the Land Rover, jumped out and went to take a closer look. The gates through which they’d gone must have been ten feet high or more and made of solid iron railings topped with rolls of barbed wire. To the left of the gate stood a squarish, two-storey brick building. Its windows, I noticed, were all boarded up. Beyond the gates spread out a great expanse of lawns dotted with trees forming what seemed to be a courtyard surrounded by long, low, elegant buildings in a neo-classical style. A rattle of keys close at hand distracted me from my observations and I noticed, at the other side of the gate, a small, plump man wearing a dark jacket and a bowler hat. Having locked the gate itself he was now engaged with the additional security of locking a heavy padlock to the ends of a chain that ran through the bars of the gate.

  “You can’t come in here, sir, madam,” he said, “It’s past gate hours and guests is not permitted in college.”

  “Where is this?” I said, “Who are you?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, sir, who I am, but I don’t mind telling you anyway. The name’s Pipply. Augustus Pipply. And this is St. Dunstan’s College, which is, as you no doubt know, the finest college in all of Cambridge.”