The sickening thump and shudder of collision as the spider-thing crashed into the back of them. Heavy impact as metal hit flesh. The scrape of the creature’s claw-tipped limbs along the side of the van filled the interior, and it slammed against the back doors. The van shook as if it were coming apart. The creature shrieked again and Morse covered his ears. Violet screamed but she couldn’t be heard.
Tomas straightened the van and pointed down the road. Then he put it in first gear, slammed his foot down and the van shot forward. The sound of the creature’s limbs upon the roof were the last thing to be heard before they left it behind.
Morse looked in the wing mirror and saw the spiderlike monster return to its hiding place amongst the cars, waiting for the next traveller.
Violet’s voice was low and trembling, and barely heard above the roar of the over-revved engine. “What was that thing?”
“An ambush predator,” Morse said. “Something different.”
Tomas just looked across at him, his eyes wide and still terrified. He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he had seen.
*
They turned onto the A1 as the light began leaving the sky. Tomas switched the headlights on to reveal the desolate road ahead. The dark was falling all about them. Glimpses of figures in the roadside wrecks.
The duel carriageway stretched into the distance, into nothing, chased by the headlights. Morse watched the darkness outside the window, reciting an old nursery rhyme inside his head to ignore the stiffening of his legs. He imagined what the road had looked like on the day of the outbreak and the days following. The chaos and terror. The refugees trying to leave the cities, fleeing south or north, oblivious that it didn’t make any difference because the plague was everywhere.
The van slowed to weave through a place in the road where an army truck had crashed into a limo. The van scraped barely through. In the failing light he saw bones scattered around the back of the army truck and he wondered if an infected creature would make its nest in such a place.
The engine spluttered and the headlights faded for a second.
“We might have a problem,” Tomas said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Something wrong with engine. I think something damaged when the monster attacked us.”
The van began to shudder and rattle. And when it stalled fifty yards down the road and rolled to a stop, they looked at each other and said nothing, until Violet rose from the back with a blanket over her shoulders and asked them what was wrong.
Morse stared down the road, beyond the light. “We could be in trouble.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Tomas popped the bonnet and climbed down onto the road, glancing around the carriageway as he walked to the back of the van. Morse stepped outside and switched on the MP5’s torchlight, then pulled out the retractable stock and held it against his shoulder as he swept the darkness. He followed Tomas, who was gathering a toolbox and some road flares. Morse was given a handful of lightsticks.
“You think you can fix it?” Morse said.
Tomas’s face was severe and bloodless. “Have to find out what’s wrong with it first. Then I fix. Hopefully. You need to keep watch.”
He nodded. “Will do. Just get it fixed.”
Tomas walked to the front of the van, hefting the heavy toolbox, a Maglite torch in his other hand.
Violet appeared from inside. “I can help.”
He looked at her then stared out at the dark. His eyes fooled him into seeing shapes that weren’t there. He blinked and ran one hand over his face. The van was surrounded by numerous scattered vehicle wrecks in the dark, negating a clear field of fire. It was decent cover for an attack. He bit the inside of his mouth as he considered it all. Trash drifted on the breeze, and there was a distinct smell of rust and decay in the air. A graveyard for the vehicles of an old world.
He felt a quiver of dread in his stomach.
“Okay,” he said. “But you do exactly as I tell you, understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
*
Morse told Violet to keep watch while Tomas tried to fix the van. He checked that Karen was safely ensconced in the back of the van then closed the doors to shut her inside.
He stood and watched the dark in the cold silence. He swept the wrecks with the light, and did not dwell on the skeletons strapped into their seats. Especially the ones he imagined turning their heads towards him once the light had moved past.
*
The voice of a child came from the far side of the carriageway, past the dark shapes of dead vehicles, faint like an echo of a memory.
“Help me…”
Morse raised his gun towards the voice. The torchlight revealed nothing but the rusting hulks he’d been watching for the last hour. A gust of wind moved past him down the road, and he thought he heard the voice again. He looked towards the front of the van, where Violet stood watch, scanning the road ahead with her torch. Tomas grunted and clinked under the raised bonnet.
“Help me. Help me please…”
Morse looked in on Karen and found her asleep.
Violet appeared and shone her torch at him. “What’s wrong?”
“I thought I heard something,” Morse said.
“Heard what?”
“A child’s voice.”
“From where?”
“From the other side of the carriageway, I think. I just checked on Karen to see if it was her.”
“Was it Karen?”
“No. I don’t think it was.”
They walked around the van, back to where Morse had been standing when he’d first heard the voice.
“Listen,” Morse whispered.
They listened, motionless
“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 get his arse in gear.”
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 barr
el. “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?”
“We’ve got company,” Morse said.
“Infected?”
“I think so. Something like that.”
“I will hurry.”
Morse looked at Violet. She was breathing hard. Smell of gunpowder.
“One came at me from between those two cars.” She pointed directly ahead and took a breath. “I think I scared it away. You should have seen the bastard….”
“It’s like they’re testing the perimeter.”
“The infected don’t do things like that, do they?”
“I’m not sure what they’re capable of.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“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 lined with circumoral teeth, 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 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. She nodded at Morse.
Tomas raised his face from the engine, oil smudged on his forehead. “Almost there.”
Morse looked towards the infected and the torchlight revealed them watching from behind the cars before they ducked out of sight. “If they surround us, we’re fucked.”
“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 at Tomas’s face.
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 chest 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 there, frozen with shock. Tomas held his hands out and cried. His tongue worried at his ravaged lips. His breath came in shuddering gasps and his body fell into spasm.
Morse looked down at Tomas, and was glad when his chest stopped moving, because he didn’t want the poor bastard to suffer any longer.
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. She looked at him.
“Karen’s not responding,” said Violet. “She won’t move. I tried to pull her out, but she’s dead weight.”
Morse looked into the van. Karen was just sat in her blankets, her head bowed. She was staring 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. She was doomed the moment the men brought her to that house.”
“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.”
“Okay.”
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 pulled from his torso and 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.
The Last Soldier Page 13
