by Tim Lebbon
Seconds later, as if placed there to reinforce Mary’s confidence in her new self and her absent mistress, she saw what awaited them.
She’s been here, Mary thought, and a rush of baseless love shoved her doubts aside. “Something nasty here,” she said, trying hard to keep the note of eagerness from her voice. She stopped behind the first car.
Peer looked up. “Oh, Christ.”
A flurry of activity animated the scene for a few seconds, birds and animals darting guiltily away. Then, all was still. The bloody mounds in the roadway that may once have been people. The smaller dead things, animals half eaten or still twitching in death throes. The steam rising above the wrecked Cavalier, like reticent ghosts unused to haunting.
Spike growled, sniffing at the window. Mary so wanted to let him out; he must be hungry. But she did not think that Peer would approve.
“I was supposed to meet these people,” Peer said, “at the service station. They were the ones I was looking for. The boy… Oh, no.” She leaned forward in her seat and pointed out a white and red mess just behind the Cavalier.
Mary looked. She could make out the vague shape of a person amidst the ruin of tattered clothing and gashed flesh. She wanted to giggle; Roger and Rupert would have been amused, no doubt. She had seen these wounds before, and the purple-scarlet of exposed guts held little repulsion for her any more. The fact that these were humans, not animals, seemed immaterial. What fascinated her more was the stench. Cow crap, spilled petrol from a ruptured tank, human shit, the tang of blood, the meaty smell of opened bodies. Underlying it all, the strange new spring freshness of fields and hedgerows. She breathed it in, tasting it, letting it touch the back of her throat. She wondered why Spike was not in a frenzy.
There were two cows huddled down on the road, broken legs protruding from beneath their massive bodies. Their flanks and bellies were torn and bleeding where hundreds of tiny teeth had bored them. Their eyes rolled wildly, throwing continuous ironic stares skyward. As well as the wounds so evident on their bodies, their udders were swollen and close to bursting. They were raving, riddled with pain. Mary thought of the chain and spikes, even glanced down at it where it sat between Peer’s feet. But that would give the wrong impression.
She needed Peer to trust her.
They walked to the wrecked cars together, Spike wandering on ahead sniffing at the ruins scattered right across the road.
“Here, Spike! Bad boy!” Mary called, but Peer could hear the humour in her voice. Spooky.
The cows reminded Peer of the herd she had seen and heard baying at the farm gates, viewed from the silent motorway. Whatever farmer owned these was, no doubt, dead in his bed. Never to be milked they would die here, like this.
“Do you have a gun?” she asked, suddenly sure that she would never be able to pull the trigger.
“Of course not,” Mary said.
“Sorry. Only, I was thinking …” She did not need to say any more. Mary nodded in sympathy, but as she looked away the corner of her lip twitched. She ran over and pushed Spike away from a dead rabbit. He dragged it with him; it was impaled on his teeth. Peer only hoped he did not transfer his attentions to the dead people, and the thought shocked her rigid.
“I’m sure they’re all dead,” she said, suddenly wanting to leave this place far behind. This was the worst she had seen all day. Dead people, dying people, Kerry with her eyeball sitting on the floor, Keith’s exposed ribs. Far, far worse. Because these people had been killed, actually slaughtered as they tried to escape whatever it was doing the killing. And from what she could see – the slashed flesh, the teeth marks in bare bone, the various dead animals both inside and outside the cars – it looked as though the animals had done all this.
“Mary,” she said, “I think we should go. I think the animals are dangerous.” Mary looked over at Spike with an almost wistful look on her face, and for a moment Peer just wanted to turn and run. She knew nothing about this person. She had hardly spoken to her, and now she was travelling in a car with a faded, pale woman who obviously lied about her past and had a murderous chain and creepy dog for company.
Jenny would have smiled at this. Just like you to hook up with a loser, Peer.
Choice was removed from her then, however, when the sound of engines rattled the still air. Around the slow bend ahead of them, past the ruins, two cars appeared.
Mary trotted back to the Escort, called Spike to her and reached in for the chain. Peer backed away, more from the terrible mess around the static cars than with apprehension over the approaching ones. When she turned around, she gasped. Mary was standing legs astride, left hand on hip, right hand swinging the chain to and fro. The blades swooshed in the air. Spike sat at her side like a living extension of her weapon. She was gazing past Peer at the two cars, her eyes those of a shark, emotionless yet full of menace. She looked terrifying.
“I’m sure they’re not dangerous,” Peer said.
“So the animals are, and a roving band of survivors isn’t?”
“Well, look.” Peer pointed around her, at the bloody scene. At the same time, she remembered the shotgun-man in Newport, and the threatening boy in the car. “They can’t all be bad,” she said, to herself more than Mary. “Things like this don’t just drive everyone over the edge. We’re still civilised.”
Try as she might, she could not shift the seed of doubt planted in her mind by Mary. It grew in fast motion as the cars neared, and by the time they halted fifty feet away, just beyond the wrecked Mercedes in the ditch, Peer was ready to turn and run. It was a feeling she was having a lot lately.
They did not switch off their engines. This sent Peer’s alarm bells ringing. Spike growled behind her. Mary’s breathing was heavy, fast, fear or anticipation flooding her blood with oxygen in readiness for action. The lead car, a Mondeo, shifted on its suspension as the back door opened and a tall black man stepped out. He was smiling, but with trepidation rather than good humour. His face was strained, the smile false like a clown’s.
“You all right?” he asked, glancing about at the destruction.
“Fine,” Peer said. “We just got here. Found this. We weren’t a part of the group, or anything.”
The tall man did not speak for a time. He took in his surroundings, frowning as the wounded cows bayed at the new arrivals. He leant back into the car, moving stiffly, and Peer heard the murmur of discussion. She could make out no words, but there were three voices involved: his own; that of another man, quiet but firm; and a woman, who seemed to be arguing with whatever the tall man was saying. Finally, he stood back away from the car.
Peer was waiting for him to raise a gun. The image seemed so likely, so certain, that she half ducked. Mary took in a breath behind her, startled by Peer’s movement rather than anything the others were doing. The dog growled, and Peer heard the sharp scrape of nails as it crouched forward, ready to attack.
“Hey, hey, no problems here, ladies,” the man said, hands outstretched, palms up. “We’re not here to cause trouble, believe me. No problems. My name’s Paul. We’ve come from Rayburn, little village in the forest. Where are you from?”
“Newport,” Peer said. “Is there anyone left in Chepstow?”
“Nothing there,” Paul said, averting his eyes. “People wandering around, waiting for the emergency services. We saw a few police, but they seemed to be doing the same thing. They told us some things. How about Newport?”
“When I left, it was on fire.”
“All of it?”
Peer shrugged. “Probably, by now. My friend died. And my neighbours.”
Paul nodded. “Lots of people have. Have you heard anything on the radio? Been able to phone anyone? Have you tried 999?”
“Who’s in the car?” Mary cut in, her voice harsh and mistrustful. The chains rattled as she spoke, and Paul glanced down at the weapon in her hand.
“Blane,” Paul said. “Hop out, let’s show the ladies we’re not meaning anything nasty here.”
B
lane! The name hit Peer, though she did not know why. Strong name. Powerful. At the same time, the strangeness of the situation struck her: having a conversation across a spread of corpses.
Blane stepped from the car. Short, wiry, balding, his eyes haunted and dark from lack of sleep. He smiled. The expression did not work. His eyes did not stop their exploration of the scene around him, lingering here, squinting there, taking everything in like a video camera.
“Blane,” Mary whispered. Peer glance over her shoulder, but the woman’s eyes were set on Blane.
“Know him?”
Mary shrugged. “No. Just the … No, of course not.”
“There are four of us here,” Paul said. “Myself, Blane. June here, driving the Mondeo. Back there in the mini, Holly. We’re to send help back to the village. When we find any.”
“I don’t know where I’m going,” Peer said, and the expression was stark, laying herself open for this man she did not know. “I had to leave Newport, and since then …”
“This is bad,” Blane said. “Bad. The animals. Remember in the woods, Paul? How it all felt wrong? Well, it’s getting worse. The animals did this.”
“Like Henry?”
Blane shook his head. “No. Henry was … something else. Though …” he trailed off, looking around, crouching on his haunches when he began swaying. “Maybe she was here.”
“How about we go across the bridge,” Paul said. “Go to the services. Find some food, and maybe an incident room will be there. Or something. There must be someone doing something about all this.”
Peer nodded. “But if it’s anything like Magor services, it’ll just be full of people hanging around. Waiting for something to happen.”
“We can try.” Blane walked back to the car and climbed in, his eyes wide and panicked. Mary threw her chain into her car and waited for Peer to go with her. For a moment, Peer wanted so much to go to the Mondeo and travel with them, ask questions, find out more. They seemed in control, if control were at all possible now. Mary was the opposite: unstable; volatile; violent, waiting only for a direction in which to aim it.
Peer’s decision was made for her. The Mondeo moved slowly past them, closely followed by the Mini. Peer returned the cautious smile of the driver, then hurried back to Mary’s car, which was already coughing into life.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Mary looked at her, eyebrows raised. “About?”
“Them.”
“I think we have to be with them,” Mary said, and spoke no more.
Peer gazed down at the Severn as they crossed the old Severn bridge. The river was high and swirling its deadly currents in random, hypnotic patterns. Thousands of tons of silt was swept along in the waters, stripped from upriver, deposited here into new shapes and new ideas. She remembered going fossil hunting on Severn Beach with an old boyfriend, picking up rocks shaped like teeth and pretending they were from a real Tyrannosaur’s mouth. Every stone they found could be a story, and they both ensured that they were.
She had discovered an ammonite hiding inside a stone the size of her fist. When she broke it open the delicate whirls and spirals of its shell were revealed, cast forever in stone, and a feeling of incredible loneliness had washed over her. The boyfriend had been further along the beach, and she had stood for a few moments staring out over the water, trying to imagine the world as it had been all those millions of years ago. Time touched her then, not just passed her by. The realisation that she was the blink of an eye, the beat of a heart in the lifetime of the planet filled her with mixed feelings of dread and, curiously, satisfaction. The sense that there was an overall scheme to things was immense, and this similarly led to the comfortable thought that whatever she did in her small, short life, could only help this scheme.
The waves washed into the beach, and out again. Constant, unchanging, merely moving position. The oceans would always be here. The cliffs loomed behind her, craggy spurs of rocks, ready to tumble at any moment. They would always be here, falling back under the onslaught of the sea, revealing more and more history to whomever may be here to search for it.
That day Peer felt a part of life, and something much greater. The ammonite had made its mark in the world, however small. She knew, then, that she would do the same.
That seemed unlikely now. Yet Peer was still filled with a sense of change, a constant feeling that she was one step removed from the mechanics of what was occurring because she was here for something else. The disaster, the deaths, were purely coincidental. She had a further purpose, something painted in the clouds or scrawled in the rock, waiting to be uncovered.
And then another thought intruded, one which was far less comforting. Maybe they were all fossils already, just waiting to pass away and be absorbed back into the planet.
Maybe they were nothing more than rebellious ghosts, refusing to lay down and die.
18. Room Full of Dead
Things are changing, Blane had said. Peer could hardly agree with him more. Indeed, few could disagree. Things are changing. It was the present tense that worried her.
She sat at a table with her chin resting in her cupped hands. Blane and Mary had gone in search of others, with the intention that they would try telephoning someone – anyone – from the offices. Mary had seemed desperate to accompany him, something which Peer could understand. Blane was small and tired and sad, but he radiated power in an almost visible wave. It was not charisma, Peer could see that he was not comfortable among people. It was strength of intellect.
And, perhaps, the underlying illusion that he seemed more aware of what was happening than anyone.
Holly and Paul sat at the table behind her, talking quietly, continuing the discussion they’d had as soon as they reached the services. Snippets of it came back to her now, words she could barely understand, ideas she did not want to hear.
“Something’s put a slant on nature,” Blane had said. “Bent it askew. Shifted it sideways. Do you feel it? When you look around you, can’t you see that things are changing?”
Peer thought she could see more than was readily apparent, and that terrified her. It had taken this man to point out the subtleties of the changes, but now it was spoken they were there for all to see. She stared out at the trees in the parking lot, wishing that they were normal. Not bent like they were, gnarled, wild.
“I never feel more at home than I do in nature,” Blane had continued. “But today, I’m homeless. It’s rejecting me. I’m no longer comfortable among the trees and the fields and the birds. There’s an air of change there. And as well as that, an intimation of violence. We’ve seen what’s happened already. Those people … they never stood a chance.”
Never stood a chance, thought Peer. They were attacked from all sides, mutilated and eaten. By cows. And birds.
It may have been those same birds flurrying past the windows now, darting between the decorative landscaping and finding invisible crumbs of food along the kerb edges. Peer was sure they threw more than an occasional glance at the service buildings.
As though they were waiting for the humans to exit.
“Sleep,” Paul had said. “That seems to be the connecting factor. I had a dream, I was falling, I hit the ground. A snow bank. When I woke up, I was bruised and battered. Other people … I don’t think they were so lucky with their dreams. Maybe not everyone had dreams of falling, but whatever’s happening, it’s killing lots of people. So, I think we have to try to avoid sleeping until we know more of what is happening. Or until we find help, and they can tell us.”
“How long can we stay awake?” June, panicked.
“I don’t know.”
“What? Days? A week? What happens then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we can sleep in shifts, watch over each other. Wake each other up when we show the first signs of dreaming. You know, twitching, REM.”
“You haven’t got a fucking clue.”
“I’m trying. We’ve all got to try. Stick together.”
“You haven’t got a fucking …”
“What about …”
It had gone on. For an hour, two, random discussions deciding nothing, conjecture, shouting, moments of hysteria. And all the while Mary sat watching Blane, staring, barely taking her eyes from him. Even on the few occasions she spoke, it was as though she were addressing only Blane himself, not the others. Holly sat next to Paul, backing him up most of the time but still objecting when he suggested staying put in the service station.
“That’s crazy! If that was a good idea, we wouldn’t be alone here now.”
“Think about it, Holly. It’s secure from … outside. No animals will get in. There are phones, toilets, fridges, cupboards full of food. Radios, TV’s in the offices. Cars outside. Petrol station. It’s a regular holiday home, if you think about it.”
“This can’t be everywhere.” Her voice, desperate.
“It may be.”
“Whatever’s happened, however far it stretches, it’s messed everything up for a while. All I’m saying is that we need to keep on the move. Travel. Explore, if you like. I take your point about being safe here, but we’d be living a lie. Waiting, on edge. We’d always be expecting that police car to come cruising into the car park, an army helicopter to land with some scientist who’d tell us, ‘Okay, everything’s sorted, you can all go home now’. At least if we’re on the move, we’re looking for help. We can see how bad things are. Christ, I just can’t sit here. Well if you all do, I’m going anyway—”
“Hold on, Holly. Calm down. Vote. We vote.”
So they had voted, a show of hands, and in the end even Paul had relented. Holly had talked him around.
Peer glanced back to where they were sitting. Holly smiled over Paul’s shoulder, and Peer returned the smile. She seemed nice. Head screwed on. Unlike Mary…
Mary. What was she all about? She’d acted as if she had recognised Blane, out there on the road, and ever since she had barely left his side. And that dog of her’s, Spike, always trotting along behind her, sniffing at that damned chain she carried around like a set of murderous rosary beads.
