And after that? Well, Mr Doggy was dog food ...or maybe baby food is more appropriate in the circumstances. Hahahaha. What do you think of that story Joey-boy?
Joe felt his gorge rising and swallowed it back, clenched his jaw and fought not to throw up.
And worse than any of that. Worst of all. The shredded, destroyed and gone for good, legs were growing back.
Twisted spines of alien bone were sprouting from the ragged stumps. They weren’t right, they didn’t resemble legs, not even the mutated parodies of legs that the creatures exhibited. These were more like sleekly irregular pieces of driftwood that wrapped round each other and melded into blunt spikes.
The small creature hissed again, louder this time, and snapped hungrily at the empty air. Evil teeth that were too big for its tiny mouth gleamed wetly in the strange light. The sharp sound of them somehow flattened in the compressed air.
It might have been the appalling snap-snap-snap sound that broke the paralysis for Pearcey. It might simply have been that he knew the group had to get moving, get past the crashed car and get away before pursuers caught up with them.
Perhaps it was the sound of Joe weakly vomiting behind him.
Joe wiped strings of sick from his mouth and tried and failed to drag his eyes from the scene in front of them. Pearcey clumsily lurched free of Julian and approached the creature. The thing became agitated, scrabbling in blood damp earth, clawing matter-clumped bones to itself.
Protectively.
Precious morsels in danger of being stolen. All the time biting at the air, defensive, yet still hungry and predatory. As if it were torn between guarding a prize and tantalised by the possibility of a greater prize.
Pearcey stumbled as he got close to it. For one awful moment, Joe thought the man might fall onto it, fall onto that snapping mouth.
Pearcey didn’t fall.
He righted himself and, as the creature surrendered to predation over preservation and lunged awkwardly forward, slammed a booted foot down on its hideous head. Slammed the boot down again and again.
Joe finally managed to tear his eyes away. Avert his gaze after the first sickening impact. He couldn’t avoid hearing the sound though. Not in that compacted storm-pregnant air. The cracking of small mutated skull and the fracture of warped infantile spine. Another addition to the nightmare slideshow that spooled endlessly in his head.
He staggered back to the Renegade. Spent and emptied after doing nothing but walk a few steps, spew bile and stand in mute horror.
<><><>
“What was it? What happened?”
Elliot asked the question quietly but the urgency was unmistakeable.
Joe shook his head, couldn’t look at the kid. Stowed the machete down the side of the seat, couldn’t bear to hold it anymore.
“Don’t ...nothing, nothing that ...matters.”
They watched Pearcey and Julian return to the Range Rover. Pearcey’s limp more pronounced, leaning on Julian and taking help to lever himself inside the four by four.
There’ll be an end to this Joe-Joe. You just have to stay the fucking course fella.
Lightning and thunder split the air, startling both of them. Rain began to spot the windscreen as they watched the chunky vehicle in front of them nudge and push a clear path, sliding and scrunching the upturned car against the wall as it scraped past, sloughing forlornly through lost blood and bone.
Joe and Elliot followed in the smaller car as the rain became a torrent and visibility shrank to a streaming blur. Their progress slowed to little more than walking pace as they struggled to even see the road. For Joe, that journey was more terrifying then any of the horrors of the previous days. There was the added element, albeit an everyday peril, of running off the road in this weather. That was shaken in and stirred with the fear of creatures swarming after them and the gut-wrenching leftover horror of the baby monster, the infant mutation.
But the prospect of collision, crashing into something unseen, running off the road into a hidden drop, those thoughts were playing on his mind. Those normal fears, oldies but goldies, gone but never forgotten, seemed magnified in the blur of rain on the windscreen.
Crash now and there wouldn’t be any police cars or ambulances rolling up to rescue your sorry ass.
Joey-boy you’re on your Jack Jones fella, on your lonesome ownsome now more than ever, my undependable friend. The only emergency responder you’re liable to get will have abnormally big fucking gnashers and fingernails to match.
Maybe it was the still warm and not so fond memory of the pandemonium on the approach to Marlborough. If they encountered a stampede like that, or a resting pack of those things, they’d be in deep shit. A big old deep well of shit with sheer walls. Deeper than he wanted to think about.
A big enough horde of those things would swamp them, stop them in their tracks and break them. Shatter and smear them on the road. Carelessly scatter them in easy pieces like the driver and passenger of the tired Citroen back there.
Their inching advance made Joe’s head thump with tension, watching for the taillights of the Range Rover, made his fingers ache with strain, gripping the wheel too hard. At intervals, they passed what may have been cottages and farms, reduced to vague smears of buildings in the downpour.
They crept past hints and allusions to obscured turnoffs, smaller lanes still than the winding torture they currently traversed, leading to places that would never be known to them. All played out under leaden skied stroboscopic lightning effects and a booming soundtrack from the end of the world.
Joe felt tight with apprehension and he sensed unspoken stress radiating from Elliot beside him.
By the time the rain began to let up, they’d started a long uphill climb. After what seemed an interminable ascent, they passed a small cluster of upmarket houses on their left and after that, two expansive mansions. Big detached properties, set behind imposing walls. Expensive new brick designed to look like it hailed from centuries past, redly dark and running wet as the storm lessened to heavy rain.
Up ahead, the hill ended at long last.
An intersection backdropped by sheer rock. The brake lights of the lead vehicle flared yet again as it stopped at the junction, nose protruding into the new road.
Joe stopped thirty feet back, engine running, handbrake engaged, leg thrumming with nervous energy as he still held the clutch on the bite.
No sleep ‘til bedtime Joey-boy. Just stick with it, get the fucking job done for one time in your useless life.
He looked over at the walled houses. Six bedrooms, seven maybe? Traditional design, not too much glass, plenty of good solid brick and walls. Good starting point. You could fortify a place like that maybe.
Maybe.
“I recognise this. Left leads home, to Oakhill,” Elliot said quietly.
“We went shopping round here once, to a farm shop. When I was younger, only little. Mom, dad, me and George. He was just a baby really. It was sunny and warm, just before we went on holiday.
We bought a big bag of potatoes. Dad could hardly lift them and they smelled after a while. We didn’t eat that many. They rotted in the porch. I remember Dad swearing ...they filled up the bin ...no room for the normal rubbish ...he was always wound up about that recycling stuff ...”
Elliot’s voice trailed off and Joe could think of nothing to say that would be right.
Ahead of them, the dull black bulk of the Range Rover slowly began to roll, disappearing from view as it turned right. Joe started after them, wheels slicking on the wet surface, the rain drumming steadily on the roof.
He reached the top of the lane, an empty main road on either side, ancient rock face in front of him. The other vehicle was stopped a little to their right on the far side of the carriageway, next to an inconspicuous turning.
Joe drove cautiously across the road and pulled up close to the Range Rover. From that position he was able to see that the turning was gated. A steel mesh affair that completely blocked the access to another
lane which wound steeply upwards and out of sight.
The gate butted solid granite to the left and a drop-off to its right. Julian was standing at a small metal box mounted on moss mottled rock, some sort of intercom. So anonymous that Joe could barely distinguish it from the rock. Julian pressed buttons and spoke into it and waited, shifting his weight from foot to foot and glancing nervously around himself.
Pearcey stood nearby, still and calm, looking bedraggled and dangerous in the rain.
It seemed that Elliot was correct, this was where they parted company with the others. The road to Oakhill lay to the left and the Black Hills complex presumably waited somewhere beyond the gate at the end of the turning.
Their recent journey had tended upward and that elevation was evident now. The roads were deserted, the only movement the shimmering veil of rain. To their right the view stretched for miles. Trees and fields and, in the distance, the weather misted concrete and glass of the city. A panoramic landscape of pewtered greens and greys that on any other rainswept day would have possessed a certain breathtaking beauty despite the louring sky and sheeting rain.
As Julian and Pearcey, hunched at the intercom, attempted to gain access to the gated lane, the rest of them exited their respective vehicles to exchange an oddly stilted farewell.
Joe spoke to Caroline while Elliot and Adalia swapped some sort of private communication, heads nearly touching in the mizzling downpour. Philip Sault remained close to the open driver’s door as if ready to bolt at any sign of danger. He wasn’t furtive, simply cold and calculating in his disregard.
And then there was the muffled clunks of locks disengaging and the gate magically disappeared.
Open fucking sesame Joey-Joe, ever-questing, never content Joe-boy. It’s probably safe up there you know. Guess they’ve still got electricity if those gates can be operated remotely fella. Barriers and barricades and all sorts of unimagined defences.
He’d never wanted a drink so badly in his life. On impulse he hugged Caroline and kissed her rainwet cheek and told her that they’d be back soon. A throwaway comment meant genuinely that turned out to be only partly true. Watched forlornly, an indefinable weight collaring his heart, as she, Adalia and Sault climbed in and she drove the SUV through the gate.
Raised his hand in response as Pearcey offered a farewell salute and Julian waved. He liked Pearcey, wanted to get to know him better and felt that the chance was somehow slipping through his dripping fingers.
He joined Elliot in the Renegade. Both of them soaked with water and stress.
“Ready for the last leg fella?”
The boy nodded.
“I can direct you from here. It’s not far now.”
Joe Byrne smiled as gamely as he could.
His left hand was sticky on the gearstick. Rain and slow oozing blood from the reopened wound on his arm. His ear throbbed, a nice counterbalance to the thud of the headache between his temples, and threw him back to the car park at the back of Adi Croger’s apartment. Where, even as Sebastian had saved him, he’d unwittingly continued down the road of failure,.
Suck it up Joey-boy, just fucking snarf it down like it was smoked salmon and poached eggs accompanied by a glass of bucks-fizz-jizz champagne substitute. Do something decent and get the boy to his brother like you promised.
It was his last chance, Joe felt that as clearly as he felt the pain in his arm and the twin throb-thud of his head. Last chance to choose. Sanctuary up on the black hill there or finally feel as though his continued breathing served some purpose.
He made his choice, despite an intuition that there was no going back.
There never was on the road.
Chapter 9.
At Road’s End.
How Joe and Elliot found George was happenstance as much as anything else.
Coincidence, if you believe in such a thing. Or perhaps it was synchronicity, an acausal connection that escaped the normal rules of cause and effect.
Perhaps it was simply fate, a predetermined confluence of events that was written in the stars.
Mayhap a divine intervention, a hand reaching down to nudge things along a course known only to that intelligence.
Whatever your belief, timing conspired with circumstance to produce an unpredictable result. An unfortunate result in some ways. Certainly a long way from an ideal result for some participants in that little story.
Joe and Elliot may have found George if they’d gone to the Church rooms as Elliot had intended. Maybe the ticking mechanism of the universe would have clicked and whirred and snicked the tracks of chance along a course that saw the brothers reunited as they’d planned.
Maybe, or maybe not.
That eventuality was never tested.
A snap decision and the die was cast.
One turning taken instead of another, randomly chosen, and the causal sequence was set, the chain reaction begun. There is always choice but the level of control that choice affords is debateable. Sometimes, however hard you try to wrest meaning from chaos, the sense of order proves elusive, events spiral beyond your grasp.
The journey from Black Hills had been as torturous as any that Joe had undertaken since the collapse. A short distance strewn with deadly complication. Under an unnatural twilight sky, creatures materialised out of nowhere. He avoided them where possible and mercilessly smashed into them when there was no other choice.
Thunderheads accumulated overhead as the storm rekindled itself, discovered new strength and massed, ready to strike, a looming hammer of the unknowable Gods. An invidious darkness descending on the world to distort the senses. Leave an obscurely metallic flavour on the taste buds, a dryness in the throat, confuse eyes wearied by exhaustion, muffle and simultaneously amplify sound.
They were so reducing, those conditions.
Robbing Joe and Elliot of perception and perspective. The world, so small a short time ago, when a different continent was an easy skip away, had once again become vast and terrifying. Their range of opportunity stretched just about as far as they could see in the growing gloom, their sphere of dubious safety was compressed into the damp cab of a stolen Jeep.
Decision became gamble and surety became uncertainty. Simple actions became unnerving, when nerves were already stretched to breaking point. A deadly game of roulette where the stakes were beyond imagining.
Elliot hesitated in his directions at a small roundabout in the Oakhill centre and Joe chose the direct route.
If Joe had chosen another exit, they’d have looped round the centre and arrived at the Church rooms.
As it was, Joe went straight on, into the Oakhill village main thoroughfare, spurred by the peripheral vision of running things, imagined or real would be never be determined.
The boy had dithered, seemed unsure.
Prevarication had always been an invitation to disaster in Joe’s mind. So he made a decision, and God forgive him.
Decisions have consequences, whether you understand them or not. The decision rolls out ahead of you and dictates the road. Dictates the next choice irrespective of how much you desire any given outcome or strive for any given destination. Sometimes it seems that the more that you want something, the more it recedes.
<><><>
It started raining again just before they entered Oakhill village. A steady rain that at times blurred vision and smudged reality.
The centre wasn’t that much of a village in the old sense of village. A sprawling and long-time abandoned police station, assorted struggling restaurants brawling for weekend custom, numerous indie outlets catering to ever diminishing markets, a supermarket frontage, two transient bars that would have failed and fallen into new ownership within months if the Collapse hadn’t rendered them obsolete.
Elliot spotted the two figures instantly, despite the greatly reduced visibility.
A ragged woman holding hands with a ragged boy, running across the road in front of them, a little way distant.
For the shortest time, a heartb
eat or two, he thought it might have been his mother and then realised that it wasn’t. Height, hair, the way she moved. Hope momentarily swirling a cloak over reality.
He knew it was George without any doubt, some sibling recognition system that defied analysis and the conditions, shrugged off hesitation like an unwelcome hand on the shoulder.
“George. That’s George. There.”
Pointing at the two figures as they disappeared between shops.
Joe floored the accelerator, bounced over kerbs and sleeping policemen and hurtled towards the gap where they’d gone.
Lost control somewhere along the way, felt it slide away from him like water sliding off his palm.
It always gets away from you doesn’t it Joey-boy? Droppy-drop-the-ball-Joe. Ever elusive, slippy-sliding fucking success. Real success. Dancing on the end of those ham-fisted finger-tips of yours and then jumping off at the last minute.
The Renegade hit the storefront side-on in a glittering cascade of shattered glass.
Keeled and then righted itself, bouncing back off the steel supports of the window frame. Jarring impacts that left Joe stunned and spitting glass and blood. Left him groaning as he felt something in his damaged arm tear deeper and begin to mewl and whimper in complaint.
Elliot was gone before Joe had time to speak, gone before Joe was even beginning to get a hold of himself. The passenger door swinging wide, water dripping into the car.
He scrambled out of that same door, clumsily grabbing weapons as he went.
Fell, skidding and lost on the slick slabbing of the pavement, letting the machete fly free rather than stab himself as he flailed for balance.
Smashed his jaw and rolled, slopping wet and drained, to stare at the drizzling grey sky.
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