The Plague Series | Book 3 | The Last Soldier

by Hawkins, Rich

  “I know,” Morse said.

  “Would you have shot them if they came after us?”

  “I said I’ll look after you. I made a promise.”

  “No one keeps all their promises, Morse.”

  “I’ll keep this one.”

  “Okay then.” She glanced at him. “Morse…”

  “What?”

  “Thank you.”

  He snorted. “No worries. Keep walking.”

  *

  Specks of rain started to fall. Morse swore under his breath and looked at the sky. In the west, echoing detonations of thunder and sounds like falling rocks on a mountainside. He thought he could hear the sea to the east, but he couldn’t see it past the dense treeline on the horizon. The smell of ash in the air made him think of firework nights when he was a boy.

  He thought he saw the Burned Man watching them from the fields, and looked away. When he looked back, the Burned Man was gone.

  By the side of the dual carriageway were the scattered belongings of refugees. Suitcases and bags. Children’s toys amongst turgid weeds. A bag of golf clubs. A teddy bear so tattered and filthy it could have been a dead animal. He almost laughed when he saw a microwave in the long grass. A dismantled shotgun, ruined by exposure to the weather. All of it faded. And down the road a soft top sports car had half-mounted the crash barrier in the central reservation. A rusted pistol that looked like police-issue lay on the tarmac next to it. He kicked the pistol away and looked ahead to where the carriageway curved to the west. He hoped for no more dogs.

  *

  As they walked Morse looked down and noticed spots of red on the road where Florence had been walking. He halted and looked up. She was slightly hunched over and didn’t seem to notice the trail of blood she was leaving.

  His hand tightened around the grip of the AK-47. “Florence?”

  She stopped and then turned around, and her nose was bleeding into her mouth and down her chin then dripping to the ground by her feet. A thin line ran from one nostril. Her eyes were glazed over, as if she was in a dream and that dream was of something warm and comforting. Then she put her hand to her nose and began to smear the blood around her mouth like garish lipstick. And only then did she seem to realise what had happened and what she was doing, and she looked at her bloodied hand and began to cry.

  *

  They sat on a suitcase by the roadside. After Florence’s nose had stopped bleeding, Morse cleaned her face with a pack of tissues he’d found in the glove compartment of an abandoned car.

  Florence sipped water from her canteen and stared at the ground with glassy eyes.

  “Are you okay?” said Morse.

  “I’m okay. Bit of a headache.”

  “Just take it easy.”

  “I can’t remember what happened, Morse. I was walking, thinking about those dogs and how they must miss their owners. Then I was bleeding…” She wiped a tear from one eye and made a puckered shape with her mouth.

  “It’s alright,” Morse said. “You’re fine.”

  “I’m scared. It was like I went away for a while. Somewhere else.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  *

  Florence regarded the sky as she walked upon the shattered tarmac. Morse watched her when he wasn’t scanning the road ahead. He shivered at the faint gust of a cold breeze between the wreckage of smashed cars. A photo of a woman was taped to the window of a car and the elements had whitened it over time until she was nothing more than a slight apparition.

  Morse stopped in the road and turned around. Looked back the way they’d come and squinted in the grey light.

  Florence’s voice behind him: “What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Morse? What is it?”

  He turned back to her. “We have to move faster.”

  *

  “What is it, Morse? What is it?”

  “Just keep moving,” he said. “Don’t stop.”

  “Is it the infected?”

  “No.”

  “Then, what?”

  “It’s the dogs. Those fucking dogs.”

  They stumbled down the carriageway and when they turned the corner they both stopped in the road and stared ahead. Florence put her hands to her face. Morse stepped forward until he was beside her. Ahead of them, the burnt out ruins and ranks of vehicles filled both sides of the carriageway and stretched on down the road to the horizon.

  “Do we have to go through all that?” said Florence.

  Morse glanced over his shoulder. “We haven’t got a choice.” He could hear the dogs far behind them; they were getting closer. “Shit. Come on. Stay behind me and stay alert.”

  Her eyes were damp and her mouth trembled. “Okay.”

  “They’ll be some nasty sights in there, Florence, so I need you to be brave.”

  “I’ve seen lots of bad things,” she said, and it broke Morse’s heart.

  He offered a wan smile. “Then you’ll be okay. Ready to go?”

  She nodded. “Ready.”

  “Good girl.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Stepping between the ruined shapes of vehicles. The smell of melted rubber and ash, burnt plastic and smoke. Florence muttered something that sounded like a prayer as they moved between the blackened hulks of trucks and caravans. Morse had slung his rifle and now held his pistol in a two-handed grip, breathing lowly through the spittle-flecked opening of his mouth. His trigger finger itched. The stuttering of his heart in a palsied rhythm. His coat sleeve snagged on a piece of twisted metal and he struggled to pull it free.

  Behind them, the sound of the dogs grew louder. Morse scanned the wrecks, his pulse quickening. He looked for movement in the maze of burnt metal. And to either side of them, among carbonised suitcases and belongings, the charred and disfigured dead dwelled in their tombs. Refugee families and desperate travellers. Morse looked inside the cars, and before he turned away their forms were revealed to him and the sight of them drained the strength from his limbs. Charred flesh melded to buckled sheet metal. Nightmare shapes with rictus grins showed their teeth, grimacing in the ashen light. Mummified figures in seats burned down to the frames. Hands grasped to doors or fused to glass. A scattering of rib bones around melted wheels. Ash beneath Morse’s boots. Florence was sobbing quietly.

  Children curled foetal in the backs of cars, scorched to black. Flaking ash and skin. Some still holding hands, siblings in death. Morse’s throat thickened and his vocal chords closed up. It started to rain as he and Florence passed between the horrors, and when he looked into one car, he saw a small, shrivelled form in a baby seat. He glanced back and saw Florence staring. Then she turned away and carried on behind him.

  Morse looked ahead to where the road curved away and there was no end to the lines of firebombed vehicles. The sight was enough to deaden his legs and fire jolts of panic behind his eyes. And as he watched, a blackened shape turned slowly in the back of a car and when its mouth opened the lower part of its face peeled away. Then, as Morse watched, it climbed from the car like a broken puppet with crumpled limbs all charred and brittle. Its eyes were blistered and white. It made a choking, tortured sound as it moved.

  Morse swallowed down a bad taste in his mouth. The creature increased its speed until it was stumbling like a drunk and almost upon them. Its hands scratched at its throat. Bones moved under the papery skin. An awful, sickly scream rose from its swollen throat.

  Florence cried out.

  Morse raised the pistol in one clean movement and shot the blackened thing in the chest, and it fell back against the side of a car. It slothfully bowed its head to look at the bullet wound, and when it looked up again, lips wet with blood from its lungs, it came towards them once more.

  Morse put one bullet in its head and one in its heart.

  The creature fell into a tangled heap of scrawny limbs, and its suffering was done.

  The barking of the dogs became louder, rising on th
e low wind. When Morse turned back they had already reached the first cars at the rear of the traffic jam. He looked at Florence and said, “Come on.”

  And then they were stumbling between the wrecks of vehicles. A corpse was slumped against a wheel, its face seared down to the skull and the rest of it so much blackened rags and bone. An infected woman was melded to her seat, obscenely alive and wheezing through a mouth formed into a frozen gasp, unable to move anything except for her flailing arms.

  The shattered tarmac turned to damp powder and ash beneath their feet. Motes of it rose into the air; it scratched at their throats.

  Then Morse stopped. He looked ahead. Florence ran into the back of him. About thirty yards ahead, a large group of infected emerged from between the burnt out vehicles further up the carriageway. They were heading towards Morse and Florence and blocking the road with their number. Dozens of them in soot-streaked clothes. Filthy, terribly emaciated figures stalking between the charred shells of cars. They came swarming on raggedy limbs.

  Morse looked back and saw the dogs running towards them, barking and snapping, hunting quarry across the wasteland.

  *

  Morse fired into the infected swarm then took Florence’s hand and pulled her with him as he moved towards the middle of the carriageway. The infected climbed over bonnets and squirmed between bumpers, wailing and screaming, pawing and scratching at metal and the blackened road. A tide of squalid bodies, implacable and insatiable.

  Florence was close to crying and her free hand was busy at her mouth. The infected closed in. Morse fired blind over his shoulder and hoped to hit something. He pushed Florence before him and helped her over the crash barrier. She fell to her knees on the other side of the carriageway. As Morse was climbing over the barrier, a sniffling man skittered from underneath a car and opened his jaws to reveal needle teeth and a squirming tongue. His deranged mouth snapped at the air where Morse’s foot had just been. But before Morse could turn the pistol upon the crawling thing, a feral dog came out from between the gutted vehicles and fell upon the infected man. Both of them tumbled away, locked in an embrace, the dog’s jaws clamped around the man’s throat.

  Morse glanced back at the road and saw the dogs attack the infected. Savage mouths and claws, sprays of arterial blood. Arms ripped from torsos and bodies conjoined in conflict. Shrieks, screams and howls. Morse stared in some kind of awe before he tumbled over the barrier and pulled Florence along with him, and they fled towards the other side of the road to the cover of the knotted undergrowth.

  *

  They tore through the trees and bracken and did not look back, chased by the barks, howls and screams of fighting beasts. They ran until they emerged onto a dirt track and stopped to catch their breath, hunched over and gasping in the cold rain. Morse checked that Florence was okay; there were small scratches under her left eye and on her brow from thorns or bramble stems, but they had already stopped bleeding. She nodded at him and wrapped her arms around her chest. He looked around, heart pounding, and holstered the pistol. His lungs felt deflated and when he took in anything but a small breath there was a dull pain in his chest. He unslung the rifle and looked back through the trees to make sure they weren’t being pursued.

  They hurried down the track for half a mile until it ended at a gravel parking area where several cars had been abandoned. Beyond that was a graveyard, and a little further on a Methodist church older than the great oaks standing over the graves. It loomed onyx-black against the sky.

  Florence pulled her coat tightly over her shoulders. “I don’t like this place.”

  “We need somewhere to hide for a while,” said Morse.

  “But why the church?”

  “As good a place as any.”

  “I once hid in a church. Frank took care of me.”

  “I know,” Morse said. “You’ve told me before.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I promised to take care of you.”

  “I know.”

  Morse dabbed at his eyes with the heel of one hand. “Come on. Let’s take a look around.”

  *

  They walked between the old graves, careful not to touch the decrepit, lichen-stained stones, and climbed the short set of steps to the arched double doors at the front of the church. Florence stood back, reluctant and pensive. She looked out to the graveyard and her eyes flitted among the resting places of the dead.

  “Do you think anyone came here, even before the plague?”

  Morse looked at her. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Just had a feeling this was a lonely place even then.”

  Morse switched on the small torchlight attached to the AK-47. He opened one door then raised the rifle and stepped onto a flagstone floor. Shadows fell back from the light. The air was choked with dust that billowed in swarms and writhing clouds. The smell of treated wood, incense, varnish and old candle smoke came to Morse and reminded him of attending Sunday services with his parents when he was a boy.

  Florence was holding onto the back of his coat, breathing in short gasps. They were in a vestibule, flanked by tall, black metal candle holders where the wax was burned down to wicks. Christian effigies, sacramental linen and deep shades of charcoal all about them.

  Ahead of them, two banks of pews were cleaved by a narrow aisle. Grey light ghosted through the windows, where the pious faces of apostles, saints and kings gave little comfort to those seeking shelter.

  Morse froze when he saw the figures seated on the wooden benches. He went to say something, but thought better of it.

  The figures turned slowly to regard the visitors.

  Florence looked around the side of him and did a sharp intake of air.

  Morse counted five of them, scattered among the pews. All of them withered and mutated, burdened with severe injuries and ailments, slopping in the rags of their clothes. A ghastly congregation come to receive communion from the figure in the pulpit: a priest whose clerical garments barely contained the tumescent deformity of his body as he gasped and gurgled through a dripping mouth.

  Florence let out a deep sob.

  Morse turned and pulled her towards the door when the infected began rising from their seats, huffing and rasping wetly while the priest shrieked his woes.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They walked a sodden dirt track under a sky heavy with cloud. Distant shrouds of rain swept each horizon.

  “I haven’t heard any infected, or the dogs,” Morse said.

  “Are we going back to the road?” Florence asked.

  “Do you want to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll just see where the track takes us.” He checked his compass. “Keep going south?”

  Florence glanced at him and wiped her mouth. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Do you feel sorry for them?”

  “Who?”

  “The infected.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The people they once were are long gone; those things are drones. Mindless things. Meat puppets.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “What?”

  Florence picked up a stone from the ground and held to her face as she walked, brushing away bits of dirt.

  “You shouldn’t feel sorry for the monsters,” Morse said. “That’s how you let your guard down and end up infected.”

  “I’m already infected.”

  “Not in the same way.”

  “Would you kill me, Morse?”

  He stopped and turned to her. “How can you ask me that?”

  She stared into his face and her eyes had a glazed shine to them. “Would you kill me, if you thought I was dangerous?”

  “You’re not dangerous, Florence. What’s inside your head is different than the plague.”

  “So you won’t answer my question.”

  “I thought I just did.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “Would you want me to kill you if you became da
ngerous?”

  “I think I would. I don’t want to hurt you, Morse.”

  “You won’t hurt me, Florence.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Morse said.

  “Okay. Do you want to talk about football?”

  “Not really. Let’s keep moving.”

  *

  The wind wailed and rose and fell, then died to a silence so profound Morse felt like he and Florence were the last two souls on a dead planet.

  They walked a narrow road flanked by old pine trees. The rain hung in the air and shrouded a nearby village beyond the waterlogged fields. Bullet holes in the road signs. A burnt out ambulance mired in deep mud at the edge of a meadow. Little else to see but the land slowly fading into the murk.

  Past abandoned houses where the doors of some were ajar and cold shades waited in dusty rooms. Animal tracks and the faint smell of urine. Weeds growing through the cracks and holes. Paths leading into dead foliage. Some of the houses had collapsed inwards and there was little left but wreckage and brick rubble. Florence made a low noise and fidgeted with her hands when they passed the remains of one collapsed house with a skeletal hand protruding from the ruins.

  A plastic doll’s head impaled on a barbed wire fence. Rainwater droplets on dead leaves. Flapping rags in the hedgerows. Morse watched for shapes and shadows. When the breeze ghosted down bridle paths and old tracks it seemed full of frail voices Morse recognised, but he knew it was a thing of his mind and he would not be fooled. He sometimes thought he was going slow in the head and a little mad, but it was a concern he ignored for now.

  They climbed a hill. Morse swept the countryside with the binoculars. Cold, grey land. Everything faded and dripping. Skeins of rain.

  Florence stood beside him. “What do you see?”

  He saw lone infected wandering the fields. Shambling figures without aim or reason. He didn’t tell Florence.