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.”
“I have to do something.”
She climbed over the crash barrier and faced him.
“What are you doing?” Morse said.
“Give me a torch and some ammo.”
“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.”
“That’s pure conjecture. 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. I’m struggling with that, at the moment, considering what she went through at the house. 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 some water from his canteen and then 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. He feared blood and time.
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 travelled.
*
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 shouted 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 with the festering insides. 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, carrying a dead mouse in its jaws. It glanced at Morse before fleeing with its prey.
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.
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 as if 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! The Jesus-Man will never return because we have rejected him! 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 s
helter. 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 by an unknown artist. He wished he were there, away from the madness of his reality.
Morse inspected the desk while he kept one eye on the door he’d used to enter. 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 when he thought of their corrupted faces and twisted bodies.
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 kicked 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. A three-round burst. 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.
The Last Soldier Page 14
