Blood on the Motorway, #1

by Paul Stephenson

  He picked up a long blade and inspected its edge. 'You want to know what I've seen since the storm?' he asked.

  Tom didn't, but he didn't much want him to use the knife on him either.

  'These people, they weren't selected by a higher power to rebuild the world. They're idiots. Their first thoughts are to pillage and plunder and scramble around like rats, picking away at what's left of the world with no thought of the future. Do you know what's going to happen a year from now, once all the food reserves are gone? All these people will die. Not one of them will think to till the earth, grow food. Useless scavenging pigs, the lot of them, and they need to be put down like the filthy vermin they are.'

  He leaned forward, grinning, wielding the blade.

  'I call bullshit,' Tom said, and the grin disappeared. His strength was waning now, but he carried on. 'It's bullshit. You can try and dress it up however you want, but you and I know the real truth. You kill people because you like to kill people. You're a sick bastard, and you know it. You waited until the world of police and justice and prisons was gone, because as well as being a fucking lunatic, you're also a fucking coward.

  'You think the people who survived won't make it? Fine, go and tell them what they need to do to survive. Be a leader. But don't pass off your own personal issues as some kind of noble act, because it just won't wash.'

  He spat blood at Ewen's feet again to underline his point. He stared at the lunatic's dark eyes and saw his expression harden.

  The knife slid into his shoulder. A jolt of pain unlike anything he'd ever felt coursed through him and the grin returned, inches from his face. He tried to struggle, but to no avail, the plastic ties cut deeper into his flesh. Every shake seemed to tear chasms in his shoulder muscles. He stopped, exhausted.

  'Fuck!' he shouted. 'Just fucking stop it, will you!'

  'Are you going to beg?' Ewen asked.

  'Fuck you, yes, I'll beg if it makes any difference,' Tom said.

  Ewen laughed. 'Not really, no.'

  Tom felt the blade slide back out of him. Ewen moved away. Tom was spent, and the prospect of any more pain seemed more exhausting than terrifying. Somewhere in his head a switch went off, and all thought went out of him, all hope evaporating with the tears on his cheeks. He was going to die.

  Ewen returned, a pair of pliers in his hand. He lifted Tom's head by the hair, his face so close Tom could smell his rancid breath.

  'Come back to me, Thomas,' Ewen said.

  Tom whipped his head forward and grabbed Ewen's nose in his teeth, biting down hard, teeth sinking into flesh. Blood filled his mouth and ran down his chin. He didn't stop.

  The air filled with Ewen's blood-curdling roar, but Tom didn't let go, even when Ewen remembered he had pliers and started lashing out with them.

  Ewen pulled away and there was a tearing sound. He stumbled backwards, his face a bloody, gaping wound.

  Tom spat the contents of his mouth on the floor, and saw a disfigured lump of flesh land by his feet. He wasn't disgusted by it, he was proud. He could die now knowing he'd affected some small measure of revenge.

  Ewen squealed, horrible sounds uttering from his nose as he tried to scream. From somewhere there was a crashing sound, and movement. Tom closed his eyes and waited to die.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Stuck Pig

  As the car pulled into the hamlet she couldn't see any movement, which wasn't to say nothing had happened since Jen and Mira had walked away from there. At least four dead bodies were in the street, and Jen knew for certain they hadn't been there the last time.

  'They look new,' Tana said from the front seat, echoing her thoughts.

  'You loaded?' Burnett said to his partner as he slowed his approach.

  Tana nodded, pulling up a shotgun from a duffle bag at his feet.

  In the twenty minutes since they'd met, they'd swapped potted histories of the man who had terrorised them since the storm. Jen told them everything he'd told her in the house, his theories about the storm, and what had happened to Sam. Tana detailed their chase around rural North Yorkshire for a man who killed for sport.

  Somehow, the knowledge that Ewen's rampage had been so widespread was a comfort to Jen, although not as much of a comfort as the two policemen in the front of their car, or the duffel bag full of guns in their laps.

  As they pulled into the hamlet, Burnett slowed.

  Jen spotted movement in one of the houses. 'In there,' she said. 'People.'

  Burnett pulled up outside the house. Through the front window, they saw a group of people in heated discussion. As one, they noticed the sudden appearance of the car and whatever discussion they were having tailed off.

  'Shall we?' Burnett asked. He loaded his own gun.

  'What about us?' Mira asked. She'd been almost silent for the entire journey, staring out of the window while the rest of them had caught up.

  'What about you?' Tana asked.

  'Don't we get a gun?'

  The men both stared at Mira for a second, then looked at Jen.

  'I'm with her,' she said.

  'Do you know how to use one?' Burnett asked.

  'I think I can work it out,' Mira said.

  Burnett nodded to Tana, who pulled out two small pistols and checked they were both loaded.

  'Here are the safety catches, okay?' he said, pointing to two small buttons on the guns. 'Press them and you're good to go. Just don't shoot us, okay? Or yourselves.'

  Jen nodded and took one.

  Mira took the other. 'Thanks,' she said, with a smile. It was the first one Jen had seen in a while.

  They got out of the car. The people were still staring through the window like they'd landed from Mars. The sight of the guns seemed to stir them, and they started to scatter.

  Burnett opened the front door and walked in. The rest of them followed. The front room was full of people trying to hide and realising they didn't have time. Jen scanned their faces and saw Ewen wasn't there.

  'Who are you?' a woman asked. She alone had stood her ground.

  'Police,' Burnett replied.

  'Or, we used to be,' Tana added.

  'What's going on?' Burnett asked.

  'There was someone shooting,' the woman replied. 'Some friends of ours went in to try to stop it. They've not come back out.'

  'She won't let us leave!' called another voice.

  'She wants us to go after them!' called another.

  'They risked their lives for you!' she screamed back at them.

  'That was their choice!' called the first voice.

  Burnett held his hands up and the room fell silent. Jen could see why he made a good police officer, he held the room completely.

  'Where?' he asked.

  'The far end of the street,' the woman said.

  Her red eyes told Jen she wasn't ready to give up on her friends yet.

  'How do you know he's still there?' Tana asked.

  'There hasn't been shooting for hours, but we've heard…' Tears welled in her eyes.

  'Why the hell didn't you go in there?' Jen asked the rest of the room.

  This many people storming one person. It would have been easy. The first woman shook her head with anger, then shot Jen a look of shared frustration.

  'Let's go,' Tana said to Burnett, and the four of them turned to leave.

  'I'm coming with you,' the woman said.

  The rest of the room fell silent. Most found something suddenly fascinating about the carpet below them.

  'I'm Jen,' she said, holding her hand out.

  'Susan,' the woman replied, taking it.

  'I hope your friends are okay.'

  'Me too.'

  They went back into the street, the two policemen moving forward with their guns drawn, scouring the street for movement, working their way to the end houses.

  'How long?' Jen asked Susan.

  'Hours. I nearly went in on my own, but…'

  Jen put her hand on the woman's shoulder, and tried to offer a
reassuring smile. The woman took a deep breath, steeling herself for whatever was about to come.

  As they reached the front door an unholy scream wrought the air, unlike anything Jen had ever heard before, and her stomach turned. Tana stepped forward, raised his leg and kicked the front door with all his might. It gave on the second attempt, bursting open in a hail of splinters. The sound of the scream increased. The reek of putrefaction hit them, but they ignored it and moved into the hallway. There was a closed door to their left. Burnett grabbed the handle. He twisted and pushed the door open.

  The scene inside was dizzying in its lack of sense. A corpse sat in one chair, an ugly wound in its chest. Opposite him, another man sat strapped to another chair, the evidence of torture clear to see all over his body. Blood covered his face and his mouth twisted in a grimace of satisfaction.

  In front of them, barely recognisable, was Sam's killer.

  He wheeled around in a panic, unsure of his footing and falling to his knees. His face was a gaping wound. He, not the man tied to the chair, was the source of the inhuman howl.

  Susan let out a wail from behind Jen. The gun fell to Jen's side. Burnett and Tana's did the same.

  Mira's did no such thing.

  Jen heard the catch of the young girl's gun as she strolled past her, raised the weapon and put it to the temple of the kneeling man. Without hesitation, she pulled the trigger, dashing Ewen's brains across the far wall.

  The noise stopped immediately, leaving only the echo of the gunshot to ring out across the room. Ewen's body fell forward with a thud, and the five of them stood in stunned silence, staring at it, until a voice broke the quiet.

  'If any of you feel like getting me out of this, I'd really appreciate it,' the man in the chair said, his voice muffled by the state of his mouth

  They turned and stared at him.

  'Seriously, I'd really appreciate it.'

  The spell broke. They rushed forward to help him.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Doorway

  The hospital was abandoned, save for the rotting corpses that filled most of the rooms, but the medicine and bandages were still there. Susan and the others had rushed Tom there in the back of a full car after a wispy angel had ended his torment with a bullet to Ewen's head.

  Yet again, he found himself nursed by Susan. She was no longer the carefree spirit who had brought him back from the brink before. Now she alternated between caring for him, blaming herself for failing to rescue him, and weeping for Leon. He was with her on that last one, but as for blaming herself, he told her continually not to. She'd explained how she'd tried to convince the others to join her in rescuing them, but it had been hard enough getting them not to flee completely. She'd only managed that by convincing them they'd be shot as soon as they set foot outside.

  He kept expecting Leon to breeze into his room, somehow unscathed, to start teasing him about being in a wheelchair, but it was never going to happen. It had taken him a few days to truly realise it.

  Not that he was short of visitors. The rest of his group had been so fawningly apologetic for letting him rot in that room that they fussed endlessly, bringing him food and water and anything else they could scavenge up for him.

  Then there were the two cops and the two women who had rescued him. The five of them spent most of their time together, common survivors of the man called Ewen. They spoke of the future, of Ewen's theories, of Jen's, but never of the things they'd been through. There was no need.

  Over the weeks that would follow, their many visitors would bring word of the outside world, of other survivors found. They told of small communities, some desperate to protect their little slice of this new world, others open to all and eager to rebuild.

  There were rumours of a new government forming in Birmingham from the ashes of the old one. There were others of London aflame. Tom barely listened. He was still trying to convince himself he wasn't tied to that chair.

  Every now and again, though, the five of them would sit talking and he would get a small glimpse of a future not filled with pain – of a new camaraderie. He just wished he wasn't so alone now.

  He sat up in his bed and stared out of the window. The storm clouds were gathering again, but in places the winter sun was breaking though, little shards of light to go along with his gossamer tendrils of hope.

  The story continues in Sleepwalk City…

  To keep up to date with this and my other releases visit my website

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  I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading Blood on the Motorway.

  If you did, the nicest thing you could do for me right now is to leave a review.

  Hate it? Well, you did get to the end, so cheers for that. You look thirsty, go get yourself a drink.

  Author’s Note

  Blood on the Motorway was my first book. Like most first books, it took the best part of a decade to write and resembles the initial idea about as closely as The X Factor resembles true artistic integrity.

  The initial seed of an idea has remained throughout. I was a child raised on a steady diet of John Wyndham and Stephen King, and in later years I was hugely inspired by Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Kirkman spoke in his intro to the first book about getting to the end of every zombie film ever made and wondering what happened next. I felt the same way about every end-of-the-world tome I ever came across. With Blood on the Motorway and its sequels, I wanted to explore that same idea, except removing the zombies altogether. Come the end of the world, I wanted to know what would happen when the real threat to the survivors was their fellow man. So was born the stories of Tom, Jen and Burnett. Over the course of this novel and its sequels the driving force is that question: What happens next, for them and the wider world?

  In terms of getting the book from that idea to the finished article, there are hundreds of people who have helped to nudge me in the right direction, but I’d like to call out just a few:

  My wonderful wife, Ellen, who has to put up with a hell of a lot of abandonment, so I can lock myself in the utility room and tap away madly.

  My amazing editor, Ro Smith, who I hope has put pay to the myth that you can’t polish a turd, and the amazing Dominic Sohor, for doing a ridiculously good job with the cover.

  Then there’s Will, Lydia and Libby, all of whom read through various drafts, made notes in the margins and offered helpful critiques.

  Lastly, there’s the people behind two podcasts: Johnny, Shaun and Dave of SPP; and Mat and Nancy from Author Strong. You’ve never met me, and you probably aren’t reading this, but if it weren’t for you all this would never have happened.

  About the Author

  Paul Stephenson writes horror stories, science fiction, and tries to be funny about music on the internet. He grew a beard long before hipsters made it popular, but only because he wanted to hide his chin. He lives in England with his wife and two children and has an unhealthy relationship with his Spotify account.

  To keep up to date with his books, please visit his website

  PaulStephensonBooks.com

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