The Plague Series | Book 3 | The Last Soldier

by Hawkins, Rich

  *

  Morse was talking to his old mate Pete Simmonds, who had been killed by an IRA sniper back in 1987. Pete said how he missed fried egg and chips and a good shag, and Morse laughed and didn’t stop laughing until the banging at the other side of the door startled him and silenced Pete’s complaints about the dripping mess that had once been the back of his head.

  The banging wasn’t real. He was merely disorientated by the thirst in his throat and the ravaging hunger in his gut.

  “Who’s there?” His voice was a mere croak. He licked his scabbed lips, but there was no moisture on his tongue to dampen them. “Who’s there? Is that you, Florence?” His throat was raw. His limbs felt petrified.

  The sound of bolts being pulled back. The click of the lock echoed inside his head. His eyes widened as the door opened and a small light appeared in the doorway and swept towards him. He cowered from the light, like a distressed child.

  The torchlight found him, stinging his eyes. The breath rattled from his chest. “Florence? Have you come back for me?”

  A voice came to him. “I’ve found you.”

  Part Three

  Ascension

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Florence wandered the shores of the fjord in the dark, listening to the lap of the water and the distant cries of sea birds. She looked at the sky and the pitch black of it made her feel small and terribly lonely. She wrapped the blanket tighter around her shoulders and kicked at small stones by her feet. She stared at the dark water for a long time, trying to summon the will to walk into the shallows and then the deeper depths, because that would mean the end of all suffering and pain, and she would join her loved ones. The infected would never have her if she took her own life.

  She kept going along the shore.

  The great shapes of the mountains beyond the fjord tempted her, and she remembered all those people who had gone up there to die. Florence thought she might do the same, but she was too tired and scared to leave the shelter of the encampment, and she’d probably collapse before she reached the mountains.

  She turned around and headed back to the camp.

  *

  Her torchlight meandered over canvas walls and flaps as she wandered amongst the tents and makeshift shelters. The silence filled her head. The abandoned belongings of refugees scattered like trash. Opened suitcases and clothes, empty food packaging and small mounds of used batteries. Fish bones in a cold campfire. Smell of ashes and piss on the breeze.

  She stood in a small clearing within the camp and looked past the gathered tents, out to where the water led to the sea. She thought of home and all she’d left behind. She thought of her school friends and her teachers, her cousins and her uncles and aunties. Her mum and dad. They were all gone. What would they say to her now?

  A sound in the sky directly above her, like whale-song from a much greater creature. A cry from cavernous lungs and chambers. She looked up. In the pitch black clouds, she sensed rather than saw something, and she knew it saw her, too, and it regarded her with the appraisal of a human to bacteria. Then there was a great pressure upon her, grinding on her bones. A feeling of insects swarming inside her head and scraping their little limbs over her brain. Her nose was bleeding and she could taste the blood as it dripped into her open mouth.

  She fell to her knees and tried to turn away from the sky, but she couldn’t look away because the thing bearing down on her would not allow it, so she opened her mouth and screamed and then collapsed onto the cold stones and dirt.

  The last thing she saw before she fell into the dark was the silhouette of the great sky-thing backlit by strobe-flashes of pale lightning. And then the sky filled with thunder and there was nothing else.

  *

  A light was shone into her eyes as she woke shivering and crying. A figure in a gas mask stood over her. There was a rifle slung over his shoulder and a pistol in his belt. He smelled of engine oil and smoke. She looked up at him, at the black eye holes of the gas mask, and stifled her cries with her hand over her mouth.

  Behind the man, other people in similar masks surveyed the encampment, sweeping their torches over the abandoned tents and scattered rubbish.

  “Please,” she said to the man. “Please help me.”

  The man took hold of her and helped her to sit up. He gave her his water canteen and she drank deeply until she was gasping and coughing.

  She flinched when he pulled his mask off because she was scared he’d have a monster’s face instead of a man’s.

  He smiled at her. His sad eyes. “Are you okay?”

  She drank more water as she nodded.

  “What’s your name?”

  She wiped her mouth. “Florence.”

  “Nice name.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Morse. Pleased to meet you, Florence.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  They had been on the road for two days; it had been four days since Violet rescued Morse from Darlington House. He was weak and stumbling like a drunk, holding his arms to himself in the cold. Violet helped him stand straight when he faltered. The rain murmured as it fell. They needed food and water. They were exhausted and freezing.

  “Have to keep heading south,” Morse said, his voice muffled within the hood of the coat Violet had found for him. The trousers she’d scavenged were too short for him and stopped just above his ankles.

  Violet said nothing. She watched the fields, looking for the infected, and for signs that the Order of the Pestilence had passed through here.

  “Hallow Hope,” Morse said. “Hallow Hope.”

  *

  They arrived at the high ground outside a village, cowering from the rain. The downpour shrouded the black hills.

  “We need food,” Violet said, her head bowed away from the sky. “We have to go down there and see if we can find something.”

  Morse nodded, slow and listless, his face crumpled by melancholy. The despair and exhaustion in his eyes forced Violet to turn away. Something had happened to him in the darkness in that locked room. He had lost something about himself. She once had a friend who’d lost her baby son to meningitis, and was never the same afterwards; even when she’d smiled it was humourless and cold. The last Violet saw of her was only a few days before the outbreak hit. Morse reminded her of that friend.

  Violet checked the pistol. Only three bullets left. She checked the knife in her belt.

  Morse stared at the village down the hill. Red-rimmed eyes, bloodshot and squinting. He bedraggled and forlorn. Violet pitied him, but she would take care of him because he had saved her life before and she didn’t want to be alone in the wasteland of Great Britain.

  *

  The rain soaked them long before they arrived at the village. They walked the main road, past streetlights, derelict cars and dilapidated houses. Violet entered the grocery shop, while Morse waited outside frowning at the shattered windows and the post box which had been broken into and emptied.

  Violet searched the shop and its backrooms but there was nothing, and when she returned outside the disappointment on her face must have been obvious because Morse turned away and stared down the road to where two cars had collided on the vicarage lawn.

  They went through the houses, watching for infected or other survivors. Violet searched a row of bungalows and found all the cupboards looted bare. She thought their luck was out, until she stumbled upon a stash of bottled water and tins under some loose floorboards in a house whose scarred, stained walls told of extreme violence committed long ago. She couldn’t believe her eyes; but she reached out and touched the supplies and lifted them from their hiding place and knelt staring at them until the crazed smile left her face. She kissed one of the water bottles and muttered her gratitude to whoever had left the stash there. Maybe they had been killed before using the supplies or had simply forgotten and moved on. She opened one of the bottles and drank. When she was finished, the bottle was half-empty. She wiped her mouth and exhaled deeply. Her thou
ghts seemed a little clearer now.

  Violet was almost on the verge of tears as she looked at the tins, anticipating the taste of mandarin segments in syrup. Then she went back out into the street with the supplies in two string bags she’d found in a cupboard. Morse looked at her then the supplies and gave a wan smile that broke her heart.

  Violet handed him one of the bags. Morse nodded faintly. His shabby trainers scuffed on the road. There was a distant look in his eyes as he held the bag to his stomach. Violet knew he was thinking of Florence.

  *

  Violet found a house without corpses, bones, or the leavings of wild animals inside. They shut the doors and blocked them with furniture, then closed the curtains.

  She lit their only candle, recovered from the trouser pocket of a corpse she’d stumbled upon in a field before finding Darlington House. Examining the food tins for punctures, she listed them to Morse, who stood the bottles of water by the wall. Vegetable chilli, meatballs in tomato sauce, sweetcorn, new potatoes, haricot beans, mandarin segments, peach slices, pineapple chunks, and three tins of fruit cocktail.

  “Which one do you want?” Violet asked him.

  He regarded the gathering of tins, one hand at his mouth. “Peach slices, please.”

  She handed him the tin, watched him pull back the ring and sniff at the contents. He pinched a slice of fruit between his fingers and lifted it to his mouth, bit into it and chewed. He closed his eyes and swallowed. Then he bowed his head and put one hand to his face, and Violet realised he was weeping.

  *

  Violet ate the tin of mandarin segments then drank the remaining syrup in one go. Her heartbeat quickened and her skin tingled. It was wonderful. She hadn’t eaten mandarin segments since well before the outbreak. She licked juice from her lips and fingers then slumped back against the wall.

  Morse watched her while he sipped water.

  “You okay, Morse?”

  He took the bottle from his mouth. “I can’t believe you’re alive.”

  “I could say the same to you.”

  “When we parted back at the van, I was certain you’d die. Did you destroy the nest?”

  “I killed them all.”

  “Impressive.”

  “Their nest was in an old building site. They were asleep when I found them, curled around each other. There were bones and scraps of clothing on the ground. I found Karen’s head.”

  “How did you kill them?” Morse asked.

  “There was a litre bottle of turpentine in a tool shed. Poured it over them as they slept, then I chucked in the road flare you gave me and the bastards went up in flames. Even then some of them tried to attack me, so I shot them. The ones I set on fire took a while to die.”

  She could still smell the turpentine on her hands and hear the screams of the infected creatures as they burned and reached out to her.

  “What did you do afterwards?”

  “I walked. When I arrived at Black Heddon it was deserted. Then I saw the Order’s soldiers going back and forth from the manor house. So I watched and waited, hoping to see if you were there, until they left in a convoy of vehicles and headed south. I found you in that room on the basement level. In the dark.”

  Morse’s face tightened, like he was recalling a bad memory.

  Violet said, “You told me that the Order wanted ascension. What does that mean?”

  Morse snorted. “Nothing good. Something about the next stage of evolution.”

  “They think being infected is the next step in evolution?”

  “Somewhere in-between, I think.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “The worst thing,” Morse said in a low voice, “was when I spoke to Florence, she seemed like a different person, like she was someone else. Indoctrinated. I saw the look in her eyes, in the way she looked at me. It wasn’t her. Not really her.”

  Violet was unable to look away from the pain in Morse’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Morse grabbed a blanket and pulled it up to his neck. “I’m going to get some sleep.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  *

  While Morse slept, Violet walked around the rooms with her torch, studying the artefacts of the former inhabitants. Faded photos of children making silly faces. Pictures of cute dogs. Small mementoes and relics. A shelf full of ornithology books and porcelain doves. A sideboard crammed into a corner, topped with a platoon of plastic toy soldiers.

  She went through a white door into the garage attached to the side of the house, and stood in the dark, sweeping the torchlight over a dull green Land Rover Defender. The painted metal gleamed under a layer of dust.

  She whistled lowly. “Well, hello.”

  Apart from the deflated tyres, the vehicle was in good condition. She found a set of keys on a wall-hook in the kitchen and climbed into the vehicle. When she tried the ignition there was nothing but a dry clicking. She tried again and it was the same. Then she tried once more and then gave up because she was worried the sound would attract any nearby infected.

  After she’d popped the bonnet, she checked the battery then the water and the oil. She stood there and inhaled. The smell of cold engines brought back memories of helping her dad fix his car when she was a little girl.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  In the morning she left Morse in the house and went out into the desolate village. She didn’t know its name, and didn’t care.

  The sky was dark grey but without rain. Her trainers scraped over the road and shards of shattered glass. She watched the houses for movement. Crows squabbled over the dead body of one of their own, bedraggled and crumpled in the road. A fox appeared in the road ahead of her and darted away when she approached.

  The mechanic’s garage was at the outskirts of the village. It was a small independent garage. A metal sign swung from a chain on a post. Chant, Bradshaw and Park’s Motors. Not exactly catchy.

  On the forecourt were rusting, bird shit-splattered cars with price-signs stuck to the inside of their windscreens. Weeds prospered around the wheels.

  The front of the building was a small office with intact windows. She opened the door and stepped inside the reception, stepping past faux-leather seats once used by customers while they waited for their cars to be brought around the front. A fake potted plant. The beige wallpaper made her eyes ache.

  The rot-stink hit her immediately, and she stepped back, grimacing, before she continued.

  A drinks machine was trashed. She rooted around in the remains, but all the cans had been taken. In the office at the back a dead man slumped over his desk; skeletal and rotting in his shirt and tie. A scalp of wispy hair above a face which was no more than a blackened skull whose remaining scraps of flesh were like putrid jelly. One of the countless dead.

  Violet found a packet of cigarettes and a lighter in the pocket of the man’s suit jacket hung over the back of his chair. A full pack. She pulled one out and sparked up next to the dead man, then sat on the edge of the desk and smoked slowly with hands shaking from the sudden burst of nicotine.

  She allowed herself a small smile and knew she’d have to ration the cigarettes in future.

  *

  As rain began to fall she went out to the garage at the back of the property and aimed her pistol and torch into the dark mouth of the entrance where the large sliding doors were open just enough for someone her size to fit through. She stood and waited for something to rush out at her, but when nothing emerged she stepped inside and tried not to panic at the swarm of the dark about her. She moved the torchlight over the inside of the garage, across the floor and up-and-down the walls, breathing silently. The smells of engine oil and WD-40 were like bittersweet memories.

  She swept the torch over hydraulic presses and racks of tyres, stacked tool boxes and jacking beams. Diagnostic machines, engine cranes, and emission analysers. While she searched amongst the various equipment racks and stands, looking for a battery compatible
with the Land Rover, she scavenged a lump hammer and a crowbar, and put both of them into an empty gym bag she’d found under a workbench. In a tool chest, she uncovered a packet of cheese and onion crisps beneath some gloves.

  Eventually she found the correct battery and put it in the bag. Struggling to lift the bag, she slung the strap over her shoulder and emerged from the garage, into the dull light of the day. The rain had dwindled to drizzle. There was thunder far away.

  An infected man in overalls staggered from the birch trees on the other side of the property; he was wretched and hunched, almost skeletal, and he halted and sniffed at the air. When his gaze fell upon Violet, tendrils emerged through the torn holes in his overalls and swayed in the air, dripping pale fluid from their sharp tips. His face contorted into a snarl and his mouth slowly split open down the middle to display an inner maw of serrated teeth.

  The creature charged towards Violet. She dropped the bag, put away the torch then raised the pistol, took aim and bit down hard on her lip. The taste of smoke in her mouth. The rise and fall of her heart. She fired and the bullet took the man through his right thigh, and he fell forward. His hands clawed at the air, and he tried to rise, but before he could climb onto one leg Violet put the pistol away, took the lump hammer from the bag and walked over with the intention of breaking his body into bits.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX