The Plague Series | Book 3 | The Last Soldier

by Hawkins, Rich

“Please help…”

  “I heard it,” Violet said. “It does sound like a child.”

  “Out there in the dark,” Morse said. The inside of his stomach was cold.

  Violet aimed her torch past the crash barrier. “I don’t think it’s a child. Doesn’t sound right.”

  “It’s not,” Morse said.

  “So what is it?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Violet took a sharp breath and raised her pistol at a point within the wrecks. “There’s something between the cars, peering over the bonnet. It’s just crouching there, watching us.”

  Morse followed her torch beam and caught a glimpse of a shockingly thin figure that darted out of sight. “I saw it.”

  “I saw its eyes,” Violet said. “Staring right at me. Christ.”

  “Please help me. Please…”

  “Oh shit,” Violet whispered.

  Morse looked at her. “Go to Tomas. Watch his back. Tell him to hurry.”

  As Violet walked to the front of the van, Morse aimed his gun towards the direction of the voice. Wrecked cars, with overgrown thickets and fields beyond. He swallowed, muttered under his breath, and blinked cold sweat from his eyes. And from twenty or so yards behind the van, from the direction they’d travelled, yet another voice drifted out of the dark.

  “Help me. Help me…”

  He checked his gun and clicked the safety off. Steadied his breathing and watched the dark. There was movement beyond the reach of his light. Thin shapes capering between the ruined cars.

  And then there were several voices, all of them strangely flat and monotone.

  “Please help…”

  “Help me…”

  “Please help…”

  “Need help…”

  His heart was in his throat. He looked around the vehicle wrecks, catching glimpses of gaunt faces and gleaming eyes between the cars and through shattered windows, peering over heaps of twisted metal and scrap.

  He placed his finger on the trigger. “Come on, you fuckers. Let’s get it over and done with.”

  The sounds of hands banging on sheet metal out there. Slapping footfalls on the road. He gritted his teeth and looked down the barrel. “Come on, come on. What’re you waiting for?”

  The report of Violet’s pistol startled him. She was shouting.

  He hurried towards her. When he fell in beside her, she turned around and her face was bone white and frightened.

  “I’ve almost finished,” Tomas said, without looking up from the engine. “What the fuck is going on? What were you firing at?”

  “We’ve got company,” Morse said.

  “Infected?”

  “I think so. Something like that.”

  “I will hurry.”

  Morse looked at Violet. She was breathing hard, one hand rubbing her ears.

  “One came at me from between those two cars.” She pointed directly ahead and took a breath. “I think I scared it away.”

  “They’re testing the perimeter.”

  “The infected don’t do things like that, do they?”

  “Stay here,” Morse said. He returned to the back of the van and looked out towards the forms of metal and glass and rust. The steel skeletons. He saw a face emerge from the dark and then withdraw again. There were wet, insect-like sounds, like bone limbs rubbing together. A vague skittering followed.

  A smell came to him from his left: ammonia and old vomit.

  “Help me…”

  The voice was only a few yards away.

  Morse turned and put the gun to his shoulder.

  A thin shape rose from behind a car no more than ten yards away. And when the flashlight revealed its face, Morse tried to scream, but his throat closed up, and the thing clambered over the car towards him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The creature reached for Morse with dripping black talons, as he fired and the white-hot rounds found the thing’s chest. It collapsed five yards from him, writhing violently on the tarmac.

  “Help me…” Words scraped from inhuman vocal chords. Its mouth didn’t move. A terribly emaciated thing, with pale white skin tinged with jaundice and mottled with weeping sores. Prominent ribs and pelvic girdle. At the end of each limb, a hooked claw gleamed wetly. Hairless save for a fine wisp of downy strands on its back, its face was deathly pale and gaunt, and the stinking round maw of its mouth was like that of a lamprey.

  “Ugly bastard,” Morse said.

  The creature snapped its mouth at the air and tried to crawl towards him on its failing limbs. Morse stepped forward and put one round in its head and it fell back against the car. The last sound from its mouth was a wheezed sigh.

  Out in the dark, figures scurried and darted. Morse struck the top of a road flare and threw it out amongst the dead vehicles. A gathering of thin, hunched forms scattered from the fierce red light, clicking in their throats as they skittered away.

  Morse turned towards the front of the van when Violet fired several shots from her pistol. He looked back towards the burning flare, and in the light cast by it shadows were slowly encroaching towards him. Morse raised the gun and fired. Some of the infected shrank away and melted into the wrecks. He fired again; a three round burst took down a leering figure loping towards him from behind the warped bonnet of a Royal Mail van.

  More of the infected emerged again, and he picked his shots and the rounds found their targets. Horrible shrieks and squeals. Violet had stopped firing. Morse hoped she knew how to reload the pistol before one of the creatures reached her. He should have told her. Stupid.

  He heard Tomas’s voice, panicked and terrified.

  A creature bounded towards Morse on all fours, hissing from a slack mouth. When he shot it in the face, the back of its skull burst open and black fluid splattered the ground behind it.

  The flare had burnt down; the infected were gathering again. He fired another burst into the dark and rushed towards Tomas and Violet. She was reloading the pistol. There was a dead creature nearby, slumped on the road, its chest caved in by multiple gunshots.

  Tomas raised his face from the engine, oil smudged on his forehead. “Almost there.”

  Morse looked toward the infected and the torchlight revealed them watching from behind the cars before they ducked out of sight.

  “Okay, done,” Tomas said. “I need someone to try the ignition.”

  Morse looked at Violet. “You do it; I’ll keep watch.”

  She climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the key. A choking sound. A rattle. The exhaust struggling through a coughing fit. Violet stopped and banged her hand on the steering wheel.

  “Try again,” Tomas said, his voice strained and nervous.

  More choke and rattle.

  “Again.”

  The engine spluttered and finally rose into a growl, then fell silent as it gave out.

  “Almost there!” Tomas said. “One more time!”

  Violet turned the key again. Something clicked inside the engine and it started.

  Tomas shut the bonnet. “Give it some revs!”

  Violet switched the headlights on and they revealed a languid, horribly thin figure crouching on the roof of a car five yards behind Tomas.

  Violet shouted to him. The engine cut out again. Tomas must have heard the scrape of the creature’s nails on metal, because he turned around and followed the shape of his own shadow to the crouching thing. He made a low sound, like a word was stuck in his throat. A screwdriver dangled from his hand.

  “Get down, Tomas!” Before Morse could raise his gun the creature drew its head back and the wattle of hanging skin at its throat began to flutter and swell, and when it jolted its head forward with a sound like wet muscle ripping, it opened its mouth and a spray of pale fluid flew towards Tomas.

  Then he was screaming with his hands to his face.

  An acrid stink filled the air. Hiss of something dissolving.

  Morse fired at the creature and the rounds blew the frail bones from its thin ch
est and it tumbled out of sight.

  Violet shrieked when she saw Tomas. Morse moved towards him but stopped when Tomas lowered his trembling hands. Most of the flesh on his face had been eaten away and his eyes were bleeding and sightless. The gauze patch had dissolved. His nose was gone, reduced to raw muscle. The red hole of his mouth within his red skull yawned open and the pain and terror in his excruciating, agonised scream nearly stopped Morse’s heart. The palms of his hands were blistered and weeping. He muttered something in Polish and then pleaded for help, his voice pitiful and boyish, and stumbled blindly against the van and collapsed shaking on the ground.

  Morse stood frozen with shock. Tomas held his hands out and cried. His breath came in shuddering gasps until he fell still and lifeless, his head dropping to his chest. Morse crouched and checked his wrist for a pulse, but there was nothing.

  Violet was crying inside the cab, her head in her hands. Morse shouted at her, and she tried the engine again, but there was only a dry death rattle.

  Morse pulled her from the seat. “We have to go.” He fired a quick burst towards the advancing creatures and covered Violet as she hurried to the back of the van. She glanced back at Tomas and her face was full of confusion and grief.

  “Get Karen,” Morse said. “I’ll hold them off.

  Violet opened the back doors. Morse pivoted just as an infected with raised claws and gleaming eyes climbed upon a car and prepared to spit. He shot the thing in the throat and its neck exploded, throwing the acid-like fluid from beneath the ruptured skin of its wattle-sac, showering the immediate area. Morse backed away and reloaded the MP5 before he downed two more infected rushing towards him. He turned back to Violet.

  “Karen’s not responding,” said Violet. “She won’t move. I tried to pull her out, but she won’t come with me.”

  Morse looked into the van. Karen was just sat in her blankets, her head bowed as she stared at the floor.

  “Karen! Karen, can you hear me?”

  Karen didn’t move.

  Morse glanced away to see the creatures moving towards them, darting between and over the vehicle wrecks. There was only one ragged row of cars between them and the infected things.

  He looked at Karen, then at Violet. “Leave her.”

  “What?”

  “If we stay, we die. She’s already dead.”

  “I won’t leave her,” said Violet.

  “Then you can both die together.”

  “We can’t leave her, Morse.”

  “Do you want to die? Or do you want to take revenge on the men who abused you?”

  Violet stared at him, her eyes full of anger. But when Morse grabbed the bag of guns and fled into the adjacent field, she followed and didn’t look back and left Karen behind as the creatures swarmed over the road.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  They spent the remaining dark hours hiding in a tool shed in the back garden of a half-collapsed house. Neither of them spoke.

  At first light Morse went outside and checked the area then told Violet to follow, and she emerged into the cold morning shivering within her clothes. She turned towards the rising sun, closed her eyes and slowly inhaled.

  “Let’s go back and see if we can salvage anything,” Morse said.

  Violet opened her eyes. “Will the spitters be gone?”

  “If they’ve finished eating, yes.”

  They started back towards the road.

  *

  By the time Morse and Violet returned to the van, the infected creatures were gone, but the stench of bile and ammonia lingered, and the bodies of those Morse had killed remained where they’d fallen. He stepped around dark bloodstains in the road. Violet walked between the cars, looking at the strewn remains around her feet.

  They found what was left of Tomas. His arms and legs were flayed and scattered. His intestines had been dragged along the tarmac around the van. Most of his soft organs had been consumed. A red wound of rendered flesh and flaps of skin where his genitals had been. His skull had been broken open and the brain taken. His heart was missing.

  When Morse checked the back of the van he found the insides covered in blood and everything slashed and ripped apart. Torn strands of hair from Karen’s scalp on the floor. Sopping blankets stinking with fluids. All of the supplies contaminated or ruined.

  Morse turned around. Violet was gone.

  He found her standing away from the van with her back to him. She was staring at a trail of drying blood and gore leading away from them across the opposite lanes and into the grass and the trees beyond.

  “She’s gone,” Morse said.

  Violet wiped her face. “I know.”

  “She chose to stay.”

  “She didn’t choose anything.”

  “We should leave.”

  “You fucking wanker.”

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  She climbed over the crash barrier and faced him. “I have to do something.

  “You’re going after the creatures?”

  She took the last of the spare magazines from him. “I think they’re nocturnal. Like vampires. So they sleep during the day. I’m going to find their nest.”

  “They might not be nocturnal or have a nest.”

  “I’ll find them.”

  “You won’t come back.”

  Violet said, “I chose to leave Karen behind, to save myself. She suffered just like I did; more than I did, I suspect, and it destroyed her. I should have pulled her from the back of the van and taken her with us when we fled. So I have to do this. I don’t care if it’s insane. I’m sick of letting the monsters win.”

  Morse handed over a torch and the last road flare from his pocket.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Kill as many as you can.”

  She nodded, slipping the spare magazines into her pockets. “I’ll see you in Black Heddon, Morse.”

  “Good hunting.”

  She turned and walked away. He watched her leave.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  He was alone again. He drank water from his canteen and tried the van’s engine, but it wouldn’t start and in the end he gave up and climbed from the driver’s seat and gathered his things and started down the road towards where the carriageway curved to the west and disappeared behind the trees. His legs ached with prickling stabs, and the thought of struggling down the road filled him with a vague misery.

  The cold wind at his face and the first drops of rain on his shoulders. Everything utterly silent. He raised one hand and turned it over before his face, ignoring the tremor in his flesh.

  A mile on, he thought he heard distant gunshots from the direction Violet had gone.

  *

  He ate a cereal bar as he walked, watching the roadsides and the way ahead. It was the last of the food, and the remaining water in his canteen would only last for the day and not much of the next.

  The number of abandoned or crashed vehicles dwindled until the carriageway was empty and he was the only vessel upon it. The air, so cold and aggressive against his exposed skin, went at him with little teeth.

  In the road ahead, several deer picked through the mulch of dead leaves and scatterings. When he neared, they fled into the cover of thickets to his right. He felt their eyes watching him as he moved on, and he was sorry for disturbing them.

  *

  He muttered Florence’s name so he wouldn’t forget it. Several times he saw the Burned Man watching him from the fields.

  Further on he hid behind a car when he saw an infected boy crouching by the roadside, gnawing at the last scraps of dried flesh on the human skull in his hands. Morse watched for a while and let the boy eat, then stood and walked out into the road, and when the boy looked up with his stained mouth and his eyes livid with feral light, the blade of the machete made his death quick and without trouble.

  Morse carried on.

  He remembered the loaded marches he’d done with a full kit on his back while some arsehole sergeant-major s
houted and swore at him. He never thought he’d miss those times, but he did now, and it made his heart wince. He recalled all of the good mates he’d made during basic training. Men who were like brothers. All of that seemed like another life, lived by someone else in a storybook or a frail dream.

  Kicking stones from his path, he followed the carriageway to a fly-over where the corpses of a man and woman hung from the bridge railings, rotating in the breeze, their faces drawn-inwards and dried up, the skin of their bodies torn and bulging. Must have been dead for months. The clothes had been stripped away, even their shoes. Morse wondered what they had done, or if they had done anything, to deserve a hanging from a lonely bridge.

  He saw that they both wore wedding rings, and he moved on, careful not to look back.

  *

  He’d been walking for hours under the occasional glimpse of the white sun. Brief spells of soft rain. The distant calls of the infected away in the countryside. Rustling in the roadsides, a stoat scrambled through sticks and dirt.

  Every now and then, there were bones on the road. Human and animal. And next to the wreck of a smashed car, something that could have been a shrivelled, blackened heart taken from the chest of a man. He didn’t stop to examine it.

  The road stretched away, unending.

  “This is a terrible place,” he whispered.

  *

  Along the road, he thought of his parents and speculated about their fate during the outbreak. They could be just bones now. It didn’t take a leap of logic to surmise they were dead or infected. They were gone, either way.

  He wondered if they had been living in the same semi-detached house when the outbreak hit. The house they’d occupied since before Morse was born. And he thought that if Florence was dead and he survived the next few days, he’d go to the house where he grew up, and find out what happened to them.

  He halted in the road. Among a group of abandoned vehicles was a crashed hearse with all its doors hanging open. Nearby, laid flat over the inside lane, was a coffin, which he approached, irrationally worried that something would emerge – a rotted ghoul or revenant – and attack him. It was covered in grit and dead leaves, and the hinges were ruined by rust.