The Plague Series | Book 3 | The Last Soldier

by Hawkins, Rich

  He stood over the casket, reaching down and about to open it, when he drew back at the last moment as his hand was upon the lid.

  *

  Later, a man wearing rags and a crown made of little bones and feathers emerged from the roadside trees across the other side of the carriageway and stumbled towards Morse with his hands raised in exultation. Morse kept walking and raised his gun. The man traipsed across the road and stopped at the crash barrier, grinning. Saliva gleamed on his lips. His eyes shone with madness.

  Morse watched him and kept a safe distance. Glanced at the man’s hands for weapons, but there were none.

  “None of this is real!” the man cried, the manic grin never leaving his face. “None of it! It’s merely our perception of reality! It’s all a dream of a memory of a nightmare, my friend!”

  Morse ignored him and walked away.

  “God’s wrath!” the man bellowed. “Wormwood! Listen to me! Please listen!”

  The man’s voice faded into the wind as Morse left him behind.

  *

  All of the day spent on the road. He passed the great scar of the Shotton Surface Mine. A burnt down restaurant was so much dismantled and blackened rubble. As the dim sun fell away from the earth, the sky cleared, and he knew it would be a cold night. He tried to quell his gnawing hunger with sips from the canteen, but it did little, and his need for food clouded his mind past the point of distraction.

  With the darkness closing in, he left the road and started down a dirt track that he hoped would lead to shelter. He walked for almost twenty minutes, past a derelict farm where something wailed in pain, until he emerged into an open stretch of overgrown grassland. He stopped, looked around, pursing his mouth. Beyond the grassland was a long, low-roofed building with dark windows. When he saw no movement or muddled shapes in the grass he started across the field towards it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  It had been a nursing home for the elderly, before the end of the world.

  After climbing over the fence separating the field and the property Morse skirted around the side of the building and arrived in a gravel parking area where three rusting cars with flat tyres slumped alongside one another. They were empty, and the doors were locked when he tried them.

  He turned towards the building, observing its dull façade. A flight of stone steps and a wheelchair ramp led to a set of double doors flanked either side by a small window. A languid mass of ivy and pale vines filled one section of wall from the ground to the roof. The building appeared untouched by the epidemic. No smashed glass or splintered doors. No sign of a barricade, or forced entry by the infected.

  Morse aimed the gun at the front doors as he moved up the steps. A quick glance back at the waning day. The doors were unlocked and he pushed them open and edged slowly over the threshold, the carpet threadbare from the passage of visitors, residents and staff in the long ago.

  He clicked the torchlight on and stood in the foyer. The dwindling daylight behind him forced the suggestion of bland walls. Faint smell of shoe polish. A noticeboard of leaflets and flyers for events and fundraisers that were never held.

  He opened the door to the manager’s office and stepped inside, prepared for some bleeding horror to be hunched on the floor or twitching in the corner. A relieved sigh left his mouth when nothing emerged to greet him. Above the desk, a window looked out at the side of the building, where a mound of bin bags had festered for over two years.

  The filing cabinet’s drawers were left open; some of the plastic folders of documents from inside were discarded on the floor. A corkboard pinned with notices and reminders, important dates and a list of minor repairs to be done by the caretaker. A watercolour painting of a meadow.

  Morse inspected the desk while he kept one eye on the door. He was tempted to sit in the chair and rest for five minutes, but he ended up pushing it away from the desk before searching for food in the drawers.

  A paper tray of documents. Letters received and ready to be sent. An invoice for a bulk order of toilet roll. His eyes strayed to the photo in a silver frame on the desk; a woman holding hands with a little girl. Sand beneath their feet. A bucket and spade in the girl’s other hand. They both had the same colour eyes. Morse tried not to think about what had happened to them, especially the girl. He remembered the dead children in the mass graves he’d dug in the refugee centres. Those plague pits filled with cadavers. His heart crumpled.

  He left the office and took the door at the end of the foyer, and then he was in a dark corridor that led to another door at the far end. As he swept the walls and ceiling with the torchlight, shadows retreated like wary apparitions. He moved down the corridor, but they formed again behind him and he felt them at his back and against the nape of his neck.

  He stopped at the end of the corridor and put his ear to the door, suddenly aware of the silence in the confined space. Breathing out, he slowly opened the door into the room, his ticking heartbeat too loud in his head. He raised the MP5, but its torchlight dwindled before it reached the darkness at the far end of the room. He listened for the rustle and scrape of movement, the wheeze of air past sore mouths. Took a breath then released it, took one step forwards and ran the light over the walls to his flanks and the floor. The darkness was stifling, like he had been lowered into damp, peaty earth to roam in tunnels and caverns until he found an escape. His legs felt stiff and twisted, older than the sum of his years, but not by much. He walked slowly, carefully, every movement deliberate.

  The torchlight fell over empty chairs arranged before a wall-mounted widescreen television. A game of chess left unfinished on a mahogany table. He stepped around playing cards scattered on the floor. Everything covered in dust. The air smelled of mould and desiccation. The curtains were drawn over the windows on the right side of the room, and between them was the withered corpse of a man in a wheelchair with his back against the wall. The blanket over his legs had absorbed the fluid expunged from his body after he died. His raggedy head had slumped forward until his chin touched his hollowed chest. Shrunken and wizened to little more than an artist’s composition of bones in casual clothing.

  Morse swung the light away and onto three bodies under a white sheet on the floor. No blood. Their feet protruding from under the sheet, clad in old slippers. He stood there and watched the lumpen shapes, wondering if some of the infected would pretend to be a corpse in an attempt to catch prey unawares.

  He was about to reach down and pull the sheet away, when a scraping sound from nearby made him pause. He handled the MP5 and swept the torchlight around the room. It was a dry scraping, like the panic of a mouse in the walls. Morse turned to the man in the wheelchair, who was still dead and slumped.

  The scraping stopped. Morse swallowed. He tensed his shoulders and softly held his finger on the trigger. The sudden feeling that someone was behind him became a hot weight on the skin of his back, and he turned and gritted his teeth, ready to defend himself.

  Nothing there but empty floor.

  He moved the light over the walls and didn’t see the crawling woman until her reaching hands were almost at his legs. Morse let out a strangled cry and swung the gun around, glimpsing her awful face in the torchlight. Her mouth bulged with tiny jagged teeth, distending her jaws; the hole past her lips was full of squirming shapes. And then her hands were upon his thighs and scratching towards his crotch when he kicked her away and stumbled backwards. His finger twitched and the gun fired into the ceiling. The flash of the gunshot revealed a bloodied housecoat hanging from the woman’s spindly body. Morse lost his footing in a patch of pale fluid and fell onto his back, and as he put out one hand to brace his fall he pulled the sheet away from the corpses on the floor and revealed their putrid forms.

  The woman’s pale hands scraped at the carpet as she moved. Blood glistening on her chin. She gurgled in her throat, gnashing her teeth.

  Morse retreated against the wall and pulled his knees to his chest. When the woman scrambled towards him, he kicke
d her in the face with the sole of his boot. There was the crack of small bones, and she fell away into the dark, clutching her nose and mouth, whining like an injured animal.

  Morse let out a breath and scanned the floor. He could hear the woman’s wheezing respiration in the darkness.

  The torchlight found her crouching underneath a table, scratching at her face with jagged fingernails. Blood trickled from the mess of her nose. Her eyes centred on Morse and she did not hide from the light. Her hands came away from her sagging face and she let forth a shriek from the base of her throat and skittered towards him, teeth bared and splintered.

  The MP5 bucked in Morse’s arms. Two bullets caught the woman in the throat, while the last round found the left side of her jaw and tore open her cheek so that the broken teeth spilled from the new hole in her face.

  She fell onto her front less than two yards from Morse’s feet. A last wheeze from her horrid mouth.

  He stood over the body. The back of her housecoat had been torn open and the skin around and along her spine was bruised and reddened. He nudged her head with his foot, and when he was sure she was dead he turned away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Morse searched the kitchen, laundry room, staff canteen and the storeroom, finding no obvious signs of violence. Only silence in the spaces of the building. He imagined the world gone silent and dead, and it brought him some comfort. No more screaming and crying, just a quiet land of desolation. Peace on Earth, which would abide until the death of the sun.

  The scuffle of his boots on linoleum. His low breathing in time with his pulse, loud in his ears. He could hear the blood leaking from his heart.

  He went through the residents’ rooms. The decayed body of a man curled up on the floor, next to his bed, clutching an empty medication jar. His sunken face like impressions in ancient cloth. The shrivelled skin around the mouth had receded so much that he was grinning in death.

  On the walls were surrealist paintings in cheap frames. Upon a shelf, a row of paperback novels bookended by porcelain ornaments. A photo of a little boy in wellies and a raincoat, laughing as he splashed through puddles. Small mementoes his eyes could not linger upon.

  Just another life snuffed out. Would the man be remembered by anyone? Were all the people who remembered him dead? Morse wondered the same about himself.

  He looked out the window, where the horizon was broken by the shape of a town. Just another place of dead buildings and streets. And eventually all of it would fall to ash and bone.

  *

  He searched the other residents’ rooms. The ones without corpses inside them smelled of lilac or aniseed, shoe leather or cough medicine. He found some of the old people in their beds, skeletal and wasted like dried-out effigies; bundles of bones in nightdresses, pyjamas and dressing gowns. Forms that belonged in coffins safe within the earth.

  *

  From the front entrance he looked out at the approaching night. Strange thunder in the distance and the haunting cries of the infected past the trees and beyond the car park. Twilight shadows lengthened and thinned, reaching towards the doorway where he stood so small and vulnerable against the darkness.

  It felt like his heart was weakening in small increments. The dusk breeze fell against his face and throat.

  He stepped back, closed the doors, and went back into the building to shelter for the night.

  *

  Later, he patrolled inside the building, testing the doors and checking for visitors outside. He walked to the back of the building and looked out the patio doors, standing back from the glass in case something was out there watching the windows.

  A misshapen figure lurked at the far end of the lawn, where it met the trees at the edge of the garden. A glimpse of weak moonlight revealed the figure as a tall man in the torn remains of the clothes he’d been wearing when he was infected. Black spines had burst through the skin of his back. He twitched and trembled, hands formed into tainted claws, staring at the sky with his mouth agape and moving in the ruin of his peeled face. Morse watched him for a long while, until the man lowered his head, sniffed at the air and disappeared into the trees.

  *

  Morse holed up in a storeroom stocked with boxes of cleaning agents and wholesale packs of toilet roll. Brooms, brushes and mops leaning against one corner, like they were sharing a conversation. He made a space for himself in amongst the cleaning supplies, sitting with his back to the wall and his legs crossed beneath him. The door was barricaded with boxes of bleach, washing up liquid and fabric softener.

  He lit a candle he’d found in a drawer and emptied the weapons from the holdall onto the floor in front of him. Then he drank water while he appraised his meagre arsenal: forty rounds left for the MP5; fifteen left for the Glock pistol; the machete and various knives; a sawn-off double barrel shotgun with six cartridges. Also, a spare torch and three lightsticks.

  Slumped against the wall he listened to the silence of the building and felt soothed by it. In the dancing light of the candle he ate gravy granules from a box of Bisto he’d salvaged from under a kitchen worktop. He chewed the granules around his mouth and swallowed them with little sips of water.

  Later in the night, a storm passed over the building and he fell asleep to the sound of rain falling on the roof.

  *

  In his dreams he stood in the corridor outside the residents’ rooms, and the doors opened and they emerged with pale hands and eager mouths. They came to him and were grateful for his offering.

  *

  Morse left the nursing home soon after dawn and started across the fields at a slow walk. A dehydration headache had persisted all night, and even now it scraped at the walls of his skull.

  The sky was painted in grey and pulled by high-altitude winds. The ground hardened by frost, slowly thawing as the temperature started to rise to something barely above zero.

  He stopped at a small colony of sickly-pale mushrooms on the edge of a ditch, crouched to examine them, and picked one from the earth. It smelled like mildew. He wasn’t sure if it was edible and he didn’t want to take the chance, so he left them alone and walked on with the cold hands of the breeze pushing at his back.

  *

  He passed through a village called Brenkley and searched for food and water, but the few houses that been hadn’t burnt down were ransacked, and there was nothing left but trash. The village shop looked to have been demolished by an artillery shell. The front doors of the small church were blackened and the ground around it was charred and dead.

  An infected man, obese and naked, stumbled through wild gardens with a dead bird in his hands. Wheezing, sniffling, breathing through a mouth flooded with fluid and saliva.

  Morse contemplated using the machete, but the risk of taking on such a hulking thing was too much, so when the man lumbered towards him, stuffing the bird into a slavering mouth, Morse fired twice and the man’s head snapped back and he collapsed like an overstuffed sack of meat being dropped.

  As Morse walked past, the man’s legs twitched, so he put another round in him, just in case.

  *

  He left Brenkley through the main road and passed the coal mine outside the village, stopping once to stare at the deep pits and the derelict machinery that assumed dark shapes in the dim light of the day. The reserves of coal in the earth would be untapped forever.

  And out into the fields, passing over the ancient land, checking the map then glancing around to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

  He walked for most of the day, skirting the northern edge of Berwick Hill and carrying on through the fields, past the village of Milbourne further on. On the way he searched abandoned farmhouses and found a tin of leek soup hidden behind an old cooker. He sat at the kitchen table in the silence of the house and guzzled the soup in minutes, cold and straight from the can. And when it was finished he wiped his mouth, stood and left the farmhouse and carried on towards Black Heddon.

  In the western sky, he glimpsed a shadow in the
clouds, a leviathan waking.

  *

  He whispered a song from his childhood, to distract himself from the grind of his frail heart, but in the end the sound of his voice only seemed to define the pain and he walked on in silence.

  *

  The sky pulsed in time to his heartbeat and his eyes were watering from the hands tightening around his heart. He ground his teeth to the point where they scraped like shale. Bunched his hands into fists and held them to his chest, digging his fingernails into his palms. He looked around, his vision framed in dull flashes. There was nothing out here but him, the road and the silent land as he gulped for breath.

  Then he looked ahead and stopped, and his hands fell away to his sides. His mouth fell open.

  The Burned Man waited for him at the crossroads.

  He wiped his eyes then pulled at his face with stiffened fingers. Maybe this was his death-dream and the road which he walked would lead straight to hell.

  *

  The Burned Man beckoned him with one hand. Come closer. Do not be afraid.

  Morse approached the crossroads, stumbling upon the cracked tarmac like a blind beggar, muttering incoherent thoughts. When he reached the crossroads he stood before the Burned Man and said nothing, staring into his face. And the Burned Man grinned at him with the whitest teeth then raised his hands to Morse’s head and caressed his hair. Morse started crying. The Burned Man lowered one hand until it was over his chest and then dug his fingers into Morse’s flesh to reach for his heart.