by Wood, Rick
In the end, he didn’t even need to think about it.
He knew what he thought of the human race.
And he knew what he had to do.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Sadie found Desert’s unconscious body laying atop damp grass. The opening to a vent beside her was pouring with water, drenching her body.
Sadie grabbed hold of Desert’s leg and dragged her, pulling her away from the cascading water leaking from the side of the compound. The whole place looked to be filled, and there were no longer any crevasses that were not leaking.
She lay Desert’s body beneath the shadow of a tree, using stray leaves as a cushion, and waited.
Desert’s eyes didn’t open.
Sadie pushed her, prodded her, pulled on her arm – but Desert didn’t respond.
“Nnnmm,” Sadie moaned.
Why wasn’t she waking up?
She placed an ear beside Desert’s mouth and felt no breath against her cheek.
And she recalled what she had to do.
She lifted her hands in the air, balled them together into a combined fist, and brought them hurtling down upon Desert’s chest. She waited a moment, then did the same again. And again. And again.
What else had Desert shown her?
She pinched Desert’s nose and opened her mouth. She breathed into it, long breaths, long and hard, just as she remembered.
She waited a moment.
Then did the same. Pinched nose, open mouth, long hard breaths.
Pinched nose.
Open mouth.
Long, hard breaths.
Fists combined, strike upon chest, again, and again.
Pinched nose.
Open mouth.
Long, hard breaths.
Why wasn’t she waking up?
Desert had said that’s when someone would wake up.
She brought her fists down upon Desert’s chest once more, and a spluttering of water fell out of her mouth and dribbled down her chin.
She repeated the action and water dribbled out once again.
She repeated it, and only a little water fell out.
Desert choked.
She choked!
Sadie brought her fists down again and Desert choked up another gurgle of water.
Pinched nose.
Open mouth.
Long, hard breaths.
And another. And another.
Desert coughed.
This was it!
Pinched.
Open.
Breath.
Pinched.
Open.
Breath.
Pinched.
Open.
Br–
Desert’s eyes opened. She sucked in a large intake of air.
Sadie stumbled backwards, grinning with excitement, delirious with palpable giddiness.
Desert kept breathing in large wheezes of air, again and again, and again, and again.
Sadie returned to Desert’s side, and looked her in the eyes, deeply and contently.
She’d done it.
“You…” Desert mumbled, failing in her words, then trying again. “You did… You did CPR… On me…”
Sadie nodded eagerly.
Desert lifted a weary hand and placed it on Sadie’s cheek.
“Well done you,” Desert said.
Sadie beamed, as proud as she could ever be.
“Where’s Whizzo?” Desert asked, looking around.
Sadie looked up.
Where was Whizzo?
“Where is he?” Desert repeated, leaning up then falling back down with exhaustion.
Sadie stood. Looked to one side of her, to the other. Sniffed. Listened.
And looked back at the leaking vent.
Then back at Desert.
“Where is Whizzo!” Desert cried, more hysteria and urgency to her voice – at least, as much as her weakened body would allow.
But she already had her answer.
“No…”
She fell back to the surface.
Sadie went to her side and stroked the hair from Desert’s face. It was drenched.
“We…” Sadie tried.
“What?”
“We…” Sadie tried again. “We… won.”
“We what?”
“We won,” Sadie said, this time with more confidence.
Desert looked back at the building.
They had won.
Whizzo was a genius.
And now he was gone.
Yet she was alive, and the last thing she remembered was being underwater and watching Whizzo disappear through that ventilation shaft.
The one now flooded and overflowing.
“Whizzo…” she whispered. “You idiot.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
The crumbling walls of the darkened facility were home to nothing but the roaming, content dead. They were dormant, hovering mindlessly, as at peace as the undead could be.
It was quiet. Nothing but the occasional groan or grunt at what was perceived to be a disturbance but was barely even a sound.
Nothing could disturb the silence.
Except that wasn’t exactly true.
A bloodied face upon a scarred and wounded body stared through the dirty windscreen of a jeep – a jeep that had been swiftly stolen from some recently deceased guards outside the compound.
Gus Harvey paused the jeep outside the facility, looking upon the broken faces of the infected aimlessly wandering the perimeter.
There was knowledge left strewn across the floor of this facility that could either prove a gift to the human race, or an outlet for the most evil urges of the human condition.
Gus was not taking any chances.
He stepped out of the jeep and dragged himself across the side of it, holding up his body that was losing energy faster than he was losing patience.
He took out a knife and swung it into the side of the petrol tank. Petrol instantly began to spray the ground beneath, and so he hurried back to the driver’s seat and began steering.
He directed the car toward the building and drove around the wall’s edge.
The disturbance attracted the infected and what had previously been sparsely placed absent zombies was now a sickening horde, charging toward him.
He sped up.
Not that he cared all that much for his own precious life – but the job needed to be done before he could meet his demise; if he was, in fact, going to meet his demise in these moments.
Once he had made his way around the entire building, he drove out to the perimeter, to the broken fences, and sped around them. He noticed the petrol growing less in quantity, until it was just intermittent sprays. He finished his second circle of the facility, the jeep chugging and jolting, and he knew he was almost done.
A glance in the mirror showed many hungry infected still following him around.
The jeep came to a halt and would not move any longer. He climbed out of the smashed window and pulled himself atop the roof.
There they all stood. Rocking the jeep, reaching for him as he struggled to keep his balance. His fading awareness and intensifying pain didn’t make such a task any easier – but he could see the infected covering themselves in unleaded as they clambered for him. Some of them slipped and knocked others over and this prompted a snort of ironic laughter from Gus.
A year of fearing these things just to discover that they weren’t the scariest things that existed.
He took out his lighter.
“I’m sorry, Donny,” he said, knowing that the dead didn’t listen. “I promise I won’t let anyone else ever be like you again.”
He threw the lighter upon the horde of zombies and leapt from the jeep to a nearby bush.
They were up in flames before Gus’s foot had landed amongst the twigs.
He backed away just in time to see the jeep explode.
He backed away further and watched as the infected fell, struggling under the weight of the fire.
And t
hen the fire spread. Across the path he had driven the jeep, to the walls of the facility.
And there went the facility, and everything in it.
The place that had been his prison for months.
Where they had tortured Sadie. Changed Donny. Removed his leg.
The accumulated knowledge to change the world.
The walls collapsed, the interior destroyed, and a huge cloud of smoke covered the air above, masking the sun in thick puffs of pollution.
Gus stayed to watch a little longer.
To get that little bit of satisfaction, that slight reprieve. To witness what he did in Donny’s memory.
To witness the death sentence for the world’s salvation, whilst witnessing the beginning of hope for the new world’s state of being.
Goodbye Eugene Squire.
Goodbye the facility.
Goodbye Donny Jevon.
BEFORE
Chapter Fifty-Six
Something awoke Gus, and it took a few seconds of grogginess to realise what it was. He lifted his arm from its place around his sleeping wife and looked to the younger face peering up at him from the end of the bed.
“Daddy!” cried Laney.
Gus gently shushed her.
“Don’t wake Mum,” he told her, then waved her closer. She ran to his side. “What is it?”
“I had a bad dream.”
“Oh no. What happened?”
“I – I don’t want to say.”
“Well you know it was just a dream, don’t you?”
“But it felt real.”
“Dreams often do. Come on, let’s get you back to bed.”
He hoisted her up and carried her, glancing at the alarm clock. It was gone three in the morning.
He placed her back into her bed and pulled the covers over her.
“Would you like me to check your room?” he asked. He’d often done this after nightmares – checking the room for monsters of her subconscious just to prove that they weren’t really there.
She shook her head.
Strange, she always wanted him to check her room after a nightmare.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
She nodded.
“My dream wasn’t about monsters in my room,” she told him. “It was about you.”
He nodded. This made sense. He’d returned from his third tour of Afghanistan a few weeks ago, and Janet had told him how difficult it had been for her – especially during the most recent tour. She was now old enough that she could start to understand where he was and what he was doing. There were conversations at school and things she’d hear on the news, and she was bound to begin to link it all together.
“Oh,” Gus said. “Well I’m back now. Nothing bad’s going to happen to me.”
With the bullet lodged in his calf meaning he wouldn’t be returning to Afghanistan any time soon, he could actually say this with some sincerity.
“It wasn’t about you going away,” she told him, her voice small.
“It wasn’t?”
“It was about you being hurt here.”
“Here? In London?”
She nodded.
“Laney, the Taliban aren’t going to come to London.”
“No, it wasn’t… It wasn’t them…”
Gus grew confused.
“Well nothing’s going to happen to me here,” he told her.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
She shook her head. So adamant, so stubborn. Just like her mother.
“What would happen to me here?” he asked.
“In my dream you were all alone… Me and Mummy weren’t there… It was just you…”
“Just me?”
“I don’t know where we were, but there were bad people, and they were trying to get you.”
“Bad people?”
“Yes, with horrible eyes and limps and all covered in blood and stuff.”
Covered in blood?
What kind of shows had she been watching? Where on earth had that come from?
He took a deep breath, held it, and let it go.
“I don’t know what it is you saw, but it was just a nightmare.”
“But it felt so real.”
“Well, it wasn’t.”
He pulled the duvet up and tucked her in, tightening it across her in the way that always made him feel so secure when he was a child – those rare times his mum was sober enough to do it.
“Promise me something, Dad.”
“What would you like me to promise you?”
“That whatever happens to me and mum, you will still be okay.”
“Whatever would happen to–”
“Promise it, Daddy. Please!”
He hesitated.
“I promise.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“I love you too, Laney. Now go to sleep.”
She nodded. He kissed her forehead, stood, and watched her fall back to what he hoped was a more peaceful slumber.
And, just as he went to leave the room, he paused in the doorway. Looked back at her sleeping face.
It was a strange nightmare for a child to have.
A strange request for a child to make.
But she was a smart kid. Her brain worked a million miles per hour, far quicker than any other child.
Maybe she was too smart.
No, she could never be too smart.
She was perfect.
“Sweet dreams,” Gus whispered, and closed the door behind him.
AFTER THE END
Chapter Fifty-Seven
The rain seemed to be never-ending. Its incessant downpour had begun the moment the opposition fell and continued for months afterwards.
It was fitting, therefore, that the first day that the rain ceased and the sun announced itself, that Gus found himself able to step outside.
It had taken a long time to heal. In fact, from the state he had been in, he wasn’t exactly clear how he’d been walking around or, indeed, alive.
He woke up one afternoon, water pounding the weak window of a room he did not recognise. Sadie was asleep in the corner. He assumed he had been unconscious for a day.
But once Desert came in and spoke to him, he’d learnt that it had been more like months.
She regrettably admitted she gave up at one point. That, without any machines or way of knowing if Gus was in fact braindead, it was becoming pointless just sitting around waiting for him to wake up. His broken rib, broken nose and shattered cheek bones had mended themselves, but Gus’s feeble, battered mind seemed to be struggling.
Desert had said that the only reason they didn’t give up was because of Sadie. Apparently, when Desert tried to drag her away, Sadie had completely refused to leave Gus’s side.
This made him smile. That girl could barely talk to him, yet she was faithful to the last, and far cleverer than she appeared.
Desert had looted a nearby hospital and barely made it out alive, saved by Sadie at least twice. They had returned to find Gus still unmoved, but with enough supplies to sustain him for another few weeks.
And now, using his leg for the first time in a while and leaning against a crutch, he looked down to where his artificial limb used to be. Desert said it had jammed itself further in and they’d had to remove it for risk of infection.
Gus had shrugged and nodded. He was alive, and to them he was grateful – but he had no idea, nor could he begin to understand, how exactly he was still alive.
He stood atop a verge that allowed him to look over a view of fields and houses as far as he could see. The kind of view he’d once described as breath-taking. In the distance he could see a blackened building; the facility, or what remained of it.
“You all right?” came a voice behind him.
He turned and looked at her.
“I’m good,” he said. “But I was thinking.”
“What’s that?”
“The fight is done. How about we drop the name now. I mean,
Desert – I never really liked it.”
She laughed.
“Fine.” She stepped forward and offered a hand. “The name is Lucy Sanders. Nice to meet you.”
He stretched an arm from his crutch and took her hand. He held it rather than shook it, and smiled at her.
“Thank you,” he told her.
She nodded.
Sadie appeared over her shoulder.
Sweet, sweet Sadie. A girl he had originally only kept with him because she could fight, and because she could hold the key to defeating the infection.
Funny, really – how all of those things seemed so unimportant now.
“Tea’s ready,” Lucy said. “Sadie caught a rabbit and she’s quite proud of it. I think she wants you to come and taste it.”
Sadie nodded eagerly.
“I’ll be there in a moment.”
“Want any help coming in?”
“I’ll be fine.”
Lucy nodded and returned to the broken-down house they had made their home for the past few months.
Sadie remained. Waiting for him, looking worried, as if she thought Gus was about to do something bad.
“I’ll be in in a moment,” Gus told her. When she looked wounded, he added, “I promise.”
She smiled and returned inside.
Gus looked back to the view.
He’d burnt the facility. But there was still one more thing to let go of.
He took it out of his pocket. Thumbed through the pages. Looked over the cover. Choked on the dust that rose off it.
The Ever-present.
An awful book, really.
But one that meant a lot.
He took his lighter and produced the flame, attaching the spark to the corner.
He threw it into the view and watched it fall down the hill, burning, ending, and ceasing to be, until the fire was gone and the book was a blackened mess, just like the facility.
That blackened mess fell down the hill, ashes marking its path.
He kept his eyes on the book for one second longer – just long enough to whisper something.
Then he returned inside, the words he’d whispered hanging on the brief sunshine and turning to ash themselves.
“I promise, Laney.”
