The Plague Series | Book 3 | The Last Soldier

by Hawkins, Rich

  To the south-west, near a copse of wiry trees, a pack of infected were hunched over something in the yellowed grass. Some animal they’d caught.

  He didn’t tell Florence about that either.

  “There’s nothing much to see,” he finally said. He cleared his throat and spat.

  “We have to go past the border and into England,” said Florence.

  “I know.” He looked at the sky and screwed his face up. “We’re losing the light.”

  *

  Florence stopped in the road and pointed at a tattered billboard for Edinburgh Zoo. The girl stared at the fading pictures of exotic animals for a long while.

  Morse put his hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”

  “I miss going to the zoo.”

  “I never really went.”

  “You never went to the zoo, Morse?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “Can we go to the zoo? I know there’s probably nothing there now, but…”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Morse shook his head, wiped rain from his forehead. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Florence. Edinburgh will be full of the infected.”

  She never took her eyes from the billboard. “The animals are probably dead anyway. It sucks.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  As darkness moved in they looked for a place to stay for the night, and when they arrived at a junkyard in the fading light Morse said it was as good a place as any other.

  Florence agreed, but her eyes were nervous and she chewed her lip. Her face looked clammy and troubled. Morse led her through the large metal gates and between great piles of scrap metal and the husks of old cars. Engine parts stacked in skips. Derelict washing machines, microwaves and televisions, cast-iron sinks and truck exhausts. Splintered furniture. Broken toys in black bin bags. Florence crouched and picked up a plastic toy dinosaur missing its tail.

  “Tyrannosaurus Rex,” she said.

  Morse stood over her, glancing around. “Looks more like an Allosaurus.”

  “No, it’s not, Morse. I’ve watched Jurassic Park.”

  She tossed the dinosaur away and it was lost amongst the anonymous heaps of plastic and glass. Then she stood and looked around. She nodded at a ramshackle hut further into the yard. Morse had already seen it.

  “Do you think anyone lives here?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  *

  The hut was empty but in disrepair. A slumped, squat shape. It looked like something cobbled together out of materials from the yard around it. Corrugated metal and slats of wood held together by nails and rivets.

  The door was made out of overlaid lengths of timber, and Morse pushed it open and looked inside. A windowless space. A bed filled over half of the dirt floor. Stained sheets and an old pillow. But it was still better than sheltering under a tree until morning. In the waning daylight he turned back to Florence standing in the doorway.

  “It’ll do for tonight,” he said.

  *

  They ate dinner by the light of a candle, sharing a tin of cold baked beans. They drank water from their canteens and listened to the silence outside. Florence sat on the bed and stared at the floor, lost in thought. Morse sat on a plastic milk bottle crate and watched her.

  She said goodnight and fell asleep. The sounds of her gentle breathing comforted him as he reloaded the pistol magazine and thought about the next day. He went through his nightly routine of checking the rifle and the equipment in his rucksack. He tested the pistol’s trigger mechanism. Making work for idle hands. He fell asleep looking through the roof holes at the black sky that might not have been there if he didn’t already know of it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Lock the doors,” her father said.

  Florence stood at the window and watched Mr. Stewart from next door climb to his feet. Some sort of black tentacle was protruding from his mouth. He was trembling, and he pulled his hands to his chest and the fingers were crooked and scratching. And when someone down the street screamed, he turned his head that way and took off with the most vivid look of hunger in his eyes.

  Florence ran past her crying mother and up the stairs to her bedroom. She shut the door and went to the window and looked down at the street. People were running along the road, panicked and terrified. Among them were those like Mr. Stewart. They clawed and bit, scratched and mauled. Blood smeared on the road. Some people had fallen down. There was a baby’s pram pushed over on the pavement. Spilled blankets and a pink rattle.

  She saw Mr Rose, who lived across the road, attacked by Mr Gorman and Mr Loveland. He tried to fight them off, but they fell upon him and ripped his throat out and then began clawing at his chest to remove his heart while he was still breathing and pawing at them in one last attempt to defend himself.

  She saw Mrs Playle crouching by the side of the street, gnawing at her own fingers and staring at the sky.

  She saw Mr Shires standing in his front garden, the front of his t-shirt soaked with blood.

  She saw two boys she went to school with biting at a woman’s pregnant belly, ripping at skin and flesh with quick movements of their mouths. She was screaming and spluttering, her eyes bulging with pain and fear. Blood on her lips. Her fingernails raking at the ground. The boys plunged their hands into the woman’s stomach, and Florence looked away when they pulled out something squirming, grey and gore-streaked.

  Florence moved away from the window and sat on the edge of her bed. She looked around at the posters of boybands and cartoon characters. Her collection of lava lamps. Her books and trinkets. She knew the world was ending and there would be no more school or shopping trips or chocolate cake because people were eating each other and there were monsters in the streets.

  She cried as she heard her parents arguing downstairs. She thought of Mr Stewart again; kind, generous Mr Stewart, who gave her money to buy sweets and had fixed the puncture in the back tyre of her bicycle last summer. She thought of him and the people outside, and experienced a grief she’d never felt or had even known to exist.

  There were more screams outside. She clasped her hands to her ears and began to rock back and forth, staring at the wall and wishing for everything to return to the sun-lit joy of that morning only half an hour before.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Morse woke from a nightmare in which the Burned Man roamed the back lanes of the countryside and called his name among the gathered oaks, birches, elms and willows.

  He rubbed his eyes and sat up, grateful for the rifle next to him. The candle was burning down and the frail flame painted his silhouette on the wall of crisscrossed wooden planks and sheet metal. He yawned and looked towards the bed, hoping that he hadn’t woken Florence. Then he froze.

  The bed was empty.

  *

  Morse swept the rusting mounds with the torchlight. His finger remained near the trigger of the AK-47. The sky was all black and when the soft breeze fell in a certain way he thought he could hear distant thunder from the north.

  Silence and spitting rain all about him. He crouched and put his hand to one of the small boot prints leading deeper into the yard between the amassed towers of junk and forgotten things. Then he followed the tracks into the dark.

  *

  Past a jumbled pile of rusting washing machines and car engines, the torchlight revealed Florence kneeling beside a badly wounded infected man lying on the ground. The man clutched his bleeding stomach and wheezed into the damp earth; horribly mutated, with pulsing cysts and lesions on his deathly-white skin. His face was stretched over his skull and there were only sparse strands of hair left on his scalp. From within the dank hole of his mouth, a flesh-pink tongue swept across pale-slick lips. His clothes had been shredded to rags.

  Morse stared at their pale forms. Florence looked up at the light and shielded her eyes with one hand.

  “What are you doing, Florence?”

  The man r
aised his face at Morse’s voice and bared rotting teeth encrusted with grime and scraps of grey flesh. Florence placed one hand on his arm and the man looked at him and Morse thought he saw something like grief in his eyes. Florence nodded and smiled sadly.

  “Get away from it, Florence,” Morse said.

  “He’s in pain.” Florence didn’t take her eyes from the man. “He needs help.”

  Morse kept the rifle raised. His mouth opened, but he didn’t know what to say.

  “Please, Morse,” Florence said.

  He cleared his throat. “No. Come here. Now.”

  Florence looked into the torchlight, tearful and pleading. He thought she would protest, but she stood and walked to him, and only looked back at the infected man when she was beside Morse.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Morse said.

  She didn’t answer, because the infected man began to lift himself from the ground onto all fours and raise his head so that his face was vivid and appalling in the torchlight.

  “He’s sad and angry,” Florence said.

  Morse sighed. “He’s a monster.”

  The man lunged towards them with his hands raised and his long fingernails raking at the air. He made it as far as two yards before Morse put a three round burst into his chest that, in the silence of the night, was like a trinity of thunderclaps. Florence covered her ears and whimpered.

  The man collapsed onto his back and his final breaths were expelled as his chest shuddered to a stop. Morse stepped away, his hands shaking, the smell of gunpowder acrid in his nostrils.

  Florence looked at him and said nothing.

  “We have to leave,” Morse said. “The gunshots will attract the infected. More will be coming.” He pulled Florence with him and left the dead man to the earth.

  *

  They stumbled through the trees. The infected screamed and screeched in the night. The woods echoed with high-pitched shrieks and the sound of bodies thrashing through foliage and bracken.

  “Keep moving,” Morse whispered, hauling Florence along, her frail form trembling in his grasp. Morse wiped sweat from his eyes. The rucksack on his back felt like a bag of stones he wanted to shrug off and abandon. He looked back and saw movement in the oily dark between the black trunks.

  “Morse!” Florence screamed.

  He faced forward as an infected woman bolted from the undergrowth, moving like an insect, filthy with dead leaves and mud on her clothes. Her pallid face bloomed in the dark and her mouth opened and she swerved towards them, her feet crashing through the grass. From behind her teeth, something emerged and split open and dripped.

  Morse pushed Florence onwards. Then he shot the woman twice and she fell forward onto scattered sticks and stinking moss. He glanced back to see fast-moving figures flickering through the trees.

  He ran.

  *

  Through woodland and across open fields. The sky all dark. Morse’s chest shuddered and he struggled for air through gritted teeth and the rawness of his throat. Swearing under his breath and cursing himself for using the rifle.

  The torchlight glanced across Florence’s back as she ran ahead. The screams of the infected filled the night air. He shot two more squirming forms that attacked from his right flank and they flopped dead in the dirt. He pushed away the afterimage of their ravenous faces caught in the light.

  Out in the dark, the monsters were gathering, drawn to the hunt. The sounds of bedlam out in the pitch black. Deranged cries and hellish shrieking.

  Florence tripped and fell down. Morse caught up and helped her to her feet. She was sobbing, trying to catch her breath, her chest hitching as she stared into Morse’s face with wild eyes.

  “Keep going,” Morse said, wheezing the words like an asthmatic. Pinpricks needled the back of his thighs. Dull pressure at the base of his spine. Fatigue made his head heavy and pulsing.

  He sent her onward and then pivoted as several infected emerged from the dark behind him like ashen ghosts. They sprinted and flailed. Morse took aim and scattered them with gunfire and they fell down and the darkness swallowed them again. He turned away and ran after Florence, following a half- collapsed wall, through puddles and boggy ground, wincing at the loud squelching of his boots. Ahead of him, Florence climbed over a low section of the wall. He went on. She was calling to him.

  He was wiping sweat from his eyes when a spindly figure reached out of the darkness and leapt upon him, digging sharp fingers into his tactical vest. They fell together. The wind was knocked from him. He clambered to his hands and knees frantically searching for the rifle, but his hands only found mud and grass, and he grunted with panic until they finally touched the warm barrel and he scooped the rifle into his arms.

  The infected thing, all hairless and thin, was already up and moving towards him; a lurching shape of gnarled skin and vicious movements. He drew a bead on the thing’s chest and fired twice. The creature went down to its knees and gurgled then Morse put one round through its forehead and watched it crumple onto the ground.

  His ears rang. He shook his head. The pounding of approaching footfalls and damp, laboured breathing. Low growls becoming louder. Something like a pained, idiotic chortle drifted out of the night.

  Morse took a kneeling position beside the wall and aimed into the loud darkness. His heart slowed with the comfort of the rifle in his hands. Sudden flashbulb memories of Belfast and Derry. A hymn before battle. Faces of the dead on the dirt they’d died upon. The cold ground of winter. Insults and threats mouthed by teenage boys.

  The infected coalesced out of the dark, thin wraiths from the gloom, lurching, rasping and wheezing, drawn to Morse by their olfactory senses and the craving for flesh.

  He was not afraid.

  Flashes of lightning silhouetted the infected against the horizon.

  The rifle barked in his hands, thudding against his shoulder, roaring fire. The rounds found their targets, piercing meat and shattering bone, until the trigger clicked empty and the barrel smoked. And then he dropped the rifle and drew the pistol and shot the last of them until they were all dead and there were just twitching bodies before him.

  He stood, breathing slowly, restoring the air to his lungs. His arms throbbing. Something like joy in his blood. Exultation and euphoria singing in his heart. Sound and anger and screaming death. To kill, and kill well. The chemical bliss of destroying the plague’s children rose and buzzed, waned and fell until it dissipated in his veins like the comedown from a LSD trip. Then the shame and guilt gnawed at him, and he spat, wiped his mouth, his hands shaking with adrenaline. His teeth chattered.

  Morse composed himself and reloaded the pistol then the rifle. He was climbing over the wall when Florence began screaming out in the dark.

  *

  The infected man pinned Florence as she flailed and pushed at him. He tried to bite at her neck until he stopped and stared into her face, like he was suddenly beset by confusion. Saliva dripped from his lips.

  Morse kicked the man in the side of his ribs and he tumbled away growling and ended up on his knees like some supplicant awaiting judgement. He raised his face and the skin rippled and began to peel back, and his skull split into a sharp-toothed maw that gnashed and spat yellowish fluid.

  Florence scrambled away from the man. Morse raised his rifle. The white-hot rounds caught the man in the chest and throat, and he collapsed as if boneless into a broken heap, his diseased blood steaming on the cold ground.

  Morse looked down at the girl. “Are you okay?”

  She took his hand and he pulled her up. And then she hugged him tight and they stood in the field in the dark apologising to each other.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They wandered the woods and fields until dawn, and by the time the sun was above the horizon they were exhausted and shivering in the new light.

  The sky cleared. Morse couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the blue beyond the clouds.

  They sheltered under a viaduct that spanned a trai
n track. The steep walls of a gorge, overgrown with vegetation and dense vines. Huddled together, sharing food. They didn’t speak.

  Despite the exhaustion pulling at his mind, Morse was jittery and wired on the last doses of adrenaline in his blood.

  “Need to find somewhere not so exposed,” he told her.

  She looked at him, her face bloodless. Even her lips were pale. “Okay.”

  *

  They headed southwards, past the shapes of old towns. Refineries and haulage depots, factories and deserted roads. Immense warehouses on abandoned business estates.

  The sun was pale white and weak. Seemed like such a paltry thing up there, a fleeting presence, as grey clouds moved in and blocked the light.

  “Are we near the border?” Florence asked, trudging alongside Morse.

  He looked at a road sign as they walked the wrong way around a traffic roundabout. “Still a way to go yet.”

  “I wonder what England’s like.”

  “In about the same state of shit as Scotland, I expect.”

  “My dad always said they made Irn-Bru in Scotland. Is that true?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Florence. I preferred whiskey.”

  “Were you an alcoholic?”

  “It’s rude to ask that,” said Morse.

  “Why?”

  “Because it is, that’s why.”

  “Okay. But were you?”

  “No, Florence.”

  “Fair enough. My dad only drank when the football was on the telly. He supported Arsenal.”

  “I can see why he drank.”

  “Did you support a team, Morse?”

  “Yeovil Town.”