The Last Soldier

by Hawkins, Rich

  He stepped towards the bed and saw the bloodstains on the mattress. Other stains too, paler and more frequent. Under the mattress was a chamber pot. He looked around the room and didn’t like what the walls told him.

  In the next dilapidated room he found a young woman in a frayed nightdress curled up on the bed, her knees close to her chin, staring at the floor. Her mouth twitched below the dull glaze of her eyes. No expression in her moonlit face. The musty air was thick enough to impede him.

  She didn’t respond to his presence or the crossbow in his hands as he crouched next to the bed. He looked into her eyes and went to touch her wrist, but drew his hand back at the last moment when he noticed her bare arms were crisscrossed with scratches and her fingernails had been chewed to the quick. She was thin to the point of emaciation and stank of cheap aftershave and the animal sweat of men. Her stringy hair, matted with dirt, had been cut into ragged, uneven lengths by someone with no concern for how it looked.

  Morse’s eyes were drawn to her thighs, where dribbles of a pale fluid glistened. His heart sank. An incredible sadness opened inside him.

  “Are you there?” he whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  No reaction. Catatonia had hollowed her out. She blinked. And then Morse noticed the shackle above her left ankle and the chain that held her to the bed. The skin around the shackle was sore and blistered.

  His throat stiffened with anger as he spoke. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

  Her face, mottled with fading bruises, remained impassive. Into his mind came an image of Florence chained to a stained bed, and he bit down on his rage until one of his back teeth fractured. He shook his head and balled one hand into a fist then stood and grabbed the foul-smelling blanket at the woman’s feet and laid it over her so she wouldn’t be cold. Then he turned away and left her behind.

  *

  He emerged into a kitchen area lit by two lanterns placed at opposite ends of the room and immediately noticed the cloth mask draped over the back of a wooden chair nearby.

  A man was at the sink, his hands busy at his crotch. The splashing of water and slap of wet skin. When the man turned his body to one side slightly, Morse saw that his trousers were undone and he was washing his genitals with a flannel dampened from the muddy brown water in the sink.

  Morse raised the crossbow. He let out a low whistle.

  The man looked up, and his face was caught in mild surprise as the crossbow bolt speared his forehead. Blood began to dribble down the bridge of his nose. He dropped the flannel and collapsed with something like a tired sigh onto his front with his hand held to his crotch and his head to one side. His legs kicked a few times before he fell still.

  Morse put the empty crossbow aside and took out the pistol and moved to the open doorway at the other end of the kitchen. The laughter of several men issued from deeper in the house. The clink of glasses. He thought he could smell alcohol.

  Into another corridor. He stopped at the foot of a stairway when he heard a woman scream from one of the rooms above. She was silenced by the stern, drunken voice of a man. The sound of an open hand upon a face spiked the flow of blood through him. The woman was crying. When the man laughed, the woman began screaming again.

  Frozen with indecision Morse looked towards the shadows at the top of the stairs. A faint light from under the door of a room. The woman sounded too old to be Florence. But maybe she was up there in one of the rooms, tied to the bed and out of her mind with terror.

  His hand tightened around the revolver and he breathed through gritted teeth. His insides quivered. He wanted to break something. He wanted to crush the beating heart of someone despicable.

  What was this place? What the fuck was happening here?

  With all his nerve he turned away from the stairs and crept into a hallway where a candle was burning on a small table by the wall. To his right, the hallway led to the front of the house. Across the floor from him, a sliver of yellow light appeared between a set of hardwood double doors. Raised voices and raucous laughter drifted towards him. The reek of cigarettes scratched over his teeth and tongue, reminding him of old cravings.

  He crossed the hallway in three strides and halted next to the doors. Rage swelled in his chest and filled his throat. He peered through the thin opening between the doors into a large lounge decorated with the stuffed heads of animals on the walls. Candlelight and cigarette smoke. On the far side of the room, three men sat around a wooden dining table, playing a game of cards. He noticed their accents: a Yorkshireman, a Liverpudlian, and a Welshman. Like the start of a bad joke.

  Morse watched them for a moment. Shaven heads and long beards. Tattooed scalps. He recognised the driver of the van, whose beard was the brightest shade of ginger he’d ever seen. An MP5 submachine gun was standing against the wall behind the men. Morse turned away and looked down at his hands. Four rounds in the pistol. It would have to do. There might be other people in the room, out of sight, but he would have to deal with that when the time came.

  He listened to the men talk. They joked about the woman who’d been screaming upstairs and the last time they’d ever fucked someone who struggled so much. They laughed and smoked and drank from bottles of vodka and whiskey. One of them suggested bringing the guard in from outside because it was cold, but the other two didn’t agree and said he could go out and join the old man if he was that worried.

  Morse waited for them to talk about Florence, but they never said her name or even mentioned anything about a little girl.

  They kept laughing. Morse watched, one hand tightening around the pistol grip until the thin muscles in his forearms were rigid.

  *

  He searched the other rooms off the hallway and found them empty. He returned to the doors outside the lounge and listened to the men tell jokes and recite unlikely stories about their sexual prowess; about which female celebrity they’d like to have fucked before the outbreak. The Welshman said he’d seen an infected Helen Mirren in a town outside Manchester. The Yorkshireman responded by saying he’d killed an infected man who’d turned out to be Russell Brand. The man from Liverpool called them liars and said he’d seen that fit bird from Holby City tearing a man’s stomach out with her bare hands.

  Their voices were slurring. Delayed reactions. Hand-eye coordination failing.

  Morse pulled back the hammer on the pistol. Took a breath. Clenched his jaw and stretched his neck.

  In the upstairs rooms, the woman screamed again and then fell silent, and that was enough for him.

  He pushed the doors open and entered the room, raising the revolver in one hand. The men stopped talking and looked up from their card game, slack-mouthed and frowning, their eyes dulled by intoxication.

  A moment of complete silence.

  With one tattooed hand the Liverpudlian went for the pistol on the table. Morse shot him in the chest; he slumped in his chair with a cigarette stuck to his bottom lip and fell forward onto the table.

  “Who the fuck are you?” said the Welshman. The colour was gone from his face. Confusion and fear in his eyes. He was broad and tall, with a scar running down one side of his neck. Black ink on his knuckles.

  Morse put one round in his face, and he tipped over on his chair, fell against the wall and then onto the floor.

  The Yorkshireman almost reached the MP5 before Morse shot him in the back, and he collapsed as if his legs had been swept from underneath him. He screamed and arched his spine. Morse hoped the bullet had snapped his vertebrae as he walked over to him. The man tried to crawl to the gun, but Morse took him by the neck of his denim jacket and pulled him away, throwing him down on his back. The man was crying, holding his hands out, muttering for mercy in a pitiful voice that only enraged Morse. Pinprick pupils in bloodshot eyes. Several of his teeth were missing, and the ones that remained varied between black and dark brown. Healing scabs on his scalp. Spittle landed on his bearded chin. His frantic, terrified movements smeared the blood around him, and soon his hands were wet
red.

  “You took her,” Morse said. “Where is she? Is she upstairs?”

  The Yorkshireman spluttered through his tears and the pain of the gunshot. His face was pale white and Morse thought he would not be long for the world. There was no exit wound in the front of his jacket; the bullet was lodged in the flesh of his back.

  “Answer me!” Morse roared.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said, his face crumpling as he cried.

  “Don’t fuck me around. Tell me where she is.”

  “Who?”

  “The red-haired girl. Florence. She was taken in that van you’ve been driving. Was that her I heard screaming upstairs? If you’ve touched her, I’ll cut your fucking balls off and stuff them down your throat.”

  The man’s mouth hung open and his bladder let go. The front of his jeans darkened. His arms trembled and he held them close to his chest while he looked up at Morse.

  “Fuck you, piece-of-shit motherfucker,” he whispered.

  “I don’t have time to waste on you,” Morse said, and shot him in the head. He dumped the revolver and grabbed the MP5 from against the wall. Checked the rounds in the magazine and looked into the sight. Felt the weight of it in his hands. It was fitted with a retractable stock; a small flashlight was attached to the barrel. Decent bit of kit. He’d never used one during his service in the army, but he would adapt. It would do the job.

  He took what ammunition he could find for the MP5 and then looked around at the dead men. His ears rang and his hands twitched. Adrenaline fired in his blood. He took a few breaths to calm his heart. The smell of fresh blood and evacuated bowels. The stench of recent death was always the same no matter where he went.

  Morse walked out to the hallway as feet thundered upon the stairs.

  *

  He trained the rifle upon the foot of the stairway, and when a man in boxer shorts, bare feet, and fresh blood down his front emerged, he put him down with a three-round burst. The man was lying across the first few steps when Morse limped over to him, and he tried to raise the pistol in useless fingers, but Morse snatched it from his hand and then stamped on his face until his skull caved-in. When Morse withdrew his foot there was red pulp on the sole of his boot.

  Switching on the MP5’s torchlight, he climbed the stairs to the landing. The dust in the air scratched the lining of his throat. The thick walls muffled the sobbing from one of the rooms. He stepped slowly, sweeping the corridor up and down, checking the corners and recesses where someone could be hiding with a blade.

  There were three doors.

  He opened the first one and entered a bathroom. Nobody inside. Flaking walls and the cloying smell of damp within wooden panels. The enamel on the bathtub was tinged red in patches. Spots of speckled brown on the shower curtain. The toilet was full of scrunched up bits of tissue. Old stains on the floor.

  In the next room he found a disembowelled woman on the bed in the corner. A candle threw Morse’s shadow upon the wall so that it loomed over the naked woman like some demon-spirit. He stood by the bed and looked down at her. She had been strangled, judging by the bruises on her throat. Thankfully her eyes were closed. Her face was swollen and sore from the attentions of the men, and her breasts were marked with shallow cuts.

  Blood soaked the bedsheets. Her intestines frothed from her opened stomach. The smell was horrific, ripe with offal and wet muscle. The knife, which Morse noticed on the floor, had been busy between her legs too.

  Morse turned away and covered his face with his hands. A hollowing sadness ached in his chest. The back of his mouth watered with bile.

  He covered the woman with a cotton sheet from the airing cupboard and left the room before the blood soaked through the fabric.

  *

  Morse steeled himself for the next room and let out a deep breath before he opened the door and stepped inside.

  A woman was sitting on her bed, chained to the metal frame with leg cuffs in the same fashion as the catatonic girl downstairs. Her arms wrapped around her knees, she was clad in a tattered t-shirt and men’s boxer shorts. Cowering and frightened, but alive. And she regarded him over the tops of her wrists, her watching eyes starkly wide and never blinking. Her hair was cut short and into ragged tufts. One of her tearful eyes was severely bloodshot. Mascara, blusher and eyeliner had been applied heavily to her face.

  When Morse took one step forward, the woman shrank away from him and bunched up with her back to the wall; filthy and suffering from malnourishment, thin shoulders and limbs. The soles of her bare feet were black with dirt.

  Morse slung the gun over his shoulder and held his hands out. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She raised the rest of her face from behind her arms. Her dry, cracked lips looked painful. “I heard gunshots. Was that you?”

  Morse nodded.

  She glanced at his bloodied hands. “You killed the men?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Morse. I’ve come here to look for a friend of mine. A young girl named Florence. Have you seen her?”

  Her eyes were downturned. “I only get company when the men come to visit.” She looked up and spoke with a tremble in her voice. “Is Freya okay? I heard her screaming.”

  “Freya?”

  “The girl next door.”

  He hesitated, looked away.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  The woman put her hands to her face and wiped her eyes. Shook her head. “Those fucking bastards.”

  “I’m sorry,” Morse said.

  A wan smile on her face. A tear ran down her cheek. “So am I. She didn’t deserve to die.”

  *

  Morse checked the other rooms and found no sign of Florence. She wasn’t in the house. He was terrified she was already dead, that the men had finished with her before he arrived here and dumped her body in some foul ditch or in the waste pit out the back of the house. It was a struggle to ward away such thoughts. A vague discomfort ailed the left side of his chest, and it only faded when he slumped against a wall and took a deep breath.

  He returned downstairs and found the key for the woman’s leg cuff in the breast pocket of the Yorkshireman’s denim jacket, then returned to her room. She watched him warily as he bent to free the shackle from around her ankle, and when he backed away and gave her some room, she was reluctant to move and her eyes never left him.

  Her name was Violet.

  *

  Morse searched the grounds and the outhouse then checked the waste pit for Florence, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.

  When he returned to the house he found Violet sat at the table in the lounge, drinking vodka from a shot glass and smoking a cigarette she’d stolen from the dead Welshman. There were two empty crisp packets and a chocolate bar wrapper on the table. An opened bottle of water. She had dressed herself in clothes she’d found. Desert camo combat trousers and thick woollen jumper. A fleece jacket. A pair of old trainers.

  Morse went to sit opposite her, but his adrenaline sparked tremors in his limbs, and he had to stay on his feet, breathing rapidly, pacing back and forth across a few yards of floor.

  Violet peeled the lid from a tin of baked beans and began scooping out its insides with one hand. She ate noisily. She was ravenous. Morse averted his gaze towards the dead men on the floor, flexing his hands in agitation.

  She looked up from the tin of beans, with tomato sauce smeared around her mouth. “Did you place a sheet over Freya’s body?”

  He poured a measure of vodka into a tumbler then downed it and smacked the glass down on the table. “Yeah.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  “And thanks for getting me out of that fucking room.”

  Morse poured another shot. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Violet glanced at the bodies on the floor around them. “I’m glad they’re dead. Motherfuck
ers.”

  Morse raised his glass. “Here’s to human nature.” He threw the drink down his neck and grimaced. The burn inside his chest was something to distract him from his fear that Florence was gone for good.

  Violet finished the baked beans and threw the empty tin at the dead Welshman; the tin bounced off what remained of his face and clattered against the wall. Then she took a pull on the cigarette smouldering in the rim of the ashtray. When she took the cigarette from her mouth she stared at its smouldering tip. “I haven’t smoked in years.”

  “How did you end up here?”

  “I was captured a few months ago. I was heading northwards – had nowhere else to go.”

  “Did you try to escape the mainland?”

  “I reached the east coast, but I couldn’t find any boats or ships. So I thought I’d see what happened up north. They caught me outside a small village. Took all my stuff. I was brought here with some other women, to service these brave men. What a bunch of cunts. Never thought I’d end up working in a post-apocalyptic brothel.”

  “Who are they?” Morse said.

  Violet tapped ash from the cigarette and returned it to her mouth. She took a long drag and held in the smoke for a moment before she released it through her nose and she sighed.

  “They call themselves the Order of the Pestilence. Some kind of paramilitary group. This place is just a waystation and brothel for them. They’re organised, from what I’ve seen and heard.”

  Morse rubbed at his face. The image of Florence’s face wouldn’t leave his mind. His insides were full of loose parts. “There are more of them?”

  “Not here. Not now. But I think they’ve got a base somewhere south of here.”

  Morse looked at her. A sudden flare of hope in his chest. “South?”