by Tim Lebbon
His dad sighed. “Not everything,” he said.
Jack began to shake, his stomach twisted into a knot and he was sure he was going to puke. Another terrible admission from his father, another fearful idea implanted when really, he should be saying, There, there, Jackie boy, nothing’s changed, it’s all in your imagination.
What could he name? How could he lay all this out to understanding, to comprehension, to acceptance, all as he had been told? He tried, even though he thought it was useless: The villagers, like walking dead, perhaps they are. The plants, dry and brittle even though it’s springtime. Mum and Dad, scared to death… He thought at first there was nothing there that would work, but then he named another part of this terrible day and a sliver of hope kept the light shining: Mandy, in the town, saying it’s safe.
“Not everything, Jack,” his dad said again, perhaps trying to jolt his son back to reality.
“Let’s go,” his mum said. “Come on, Jack, we’ll tell you while we’re walking… it’s only two or three fields away… and there’ll be help there.” She smiled, but it could not reach her eyes.
The motorway was not three fields away; it was six. His parents told Jack all they knew by the time they’d reached the end of the second field. He believed what they said because he could smell death in the third field, and he mentioned it, but his mum and dad lied to themselves by not even answering. Jack was sure as hell he knew what death smelled like; he’d found a dead badger in the woods a year ago, after all, and turned it over with a stick, and run home puking. This was similar, only richer, stronger, as if coming from a lot more bodies. Some of them smelled cooked.
They saw the stationary cars on the motorway from two fields away. Wisps of smoke still rose here and there. Several vehicles were twisted on their backs like dead beetles.
From the edge of the field abutting the motorway they saw the shapes sitting around the ruined cars— the gray people in their colorful clothes—and although they could not tell for sure what they were eating, it was mostly red.
Jack’s dad raised his binoculars. Then he turned, grabbed Jack’s and his mother’s hands and ran back they way they had come.
“Were they eating the people from the cars?” Jack asked, disgusted but fascinated.
His father—white-faced, frowning, shaking his head slightly as if trying to dislodge a memory—did not answer.
They walked quickly across another field, their path taking them away from the woods and between Tall Stennington and the motorway. Neither was in view any longer—the landscape here dipped and rose, and all they could see around them was countryside. Nothing to give any indication of humankind’s presence; no chimney smoke or aircraft trails; no skyscrapers or whitewashed farm buildings.
No traffic noise. None at all.
Jack realized that he only noticed noise when it was no longer there.
“Dad, tell me!” Jack said. “The dead people—were they eating the people from the cars?”
“No,” his father said.
Jack saw straight through the lie.
He had taken it all in, everything his parents had told him, every snippet of information gleaned from the panicked newscasts yesterday, the confused reports from overseas. He had listened and taken it all in, but he did not really understand. He had already seen it for himself—Mr. Jude and the people in the village did not have a disease at all, and the young crop really was dead—but he could not believe. It was too terrifying, too unreal. Too crazy.
He whispered as they walked, naming the parts that scared him the most: Dead people, dead things, still moving and walking. Dumb and aimless, but dangerous just the same.
Those fingers last night had not sounded aimless, those probings and proddings at their locked-up, safe cottage. They had sounded anything but aimless.
He carried on naming. Those of you who are immune, stay at home. The broadcasts his parents had listened to had told of certain blood groups succumbing slower than others, and some being completely immune. In a way, these positive elements to the broadcasts—the mentions of immunity—scared Jack more. They made him feel increasingly isolated, one of the few survivors, and what was left? What was there that they could use now, where would they go when dead people could cut your brake cables (and that sure as shit wasn’t aimless, either), when they caused crashes on the motorway so they could… they could… ?
Jack stumbled, dug his toes into a furrow and hit the dirt. His face pressed into the ground and he felt dry dead things scurrying across his cheeks. He wanted to cry but he could not, neither could he shout nor scream, and then he realized that what he wanted most was comfort. His mother’s arms around him, his father sitting on the side of his bed stroking his brow as he did when Jack had the occasional nightmare, a cup of tea before bed, half an hour reading before he turned out his light and lay back to listen to the night.
Hands did touch him, voices did try to soothe, but all Jack could hear was the silence. All he could smell was the undercurrent of death in the motionless spring air.
Before the world receded into a strange flat brightness, Jack saw in sharp detail a line of ants marching along a furrow. They were moving strangely—too slowly, much slower than he’d ever seen one moving before, as if they were in water—and he passed out wondering how aimless these red ants really were.
He was not unconscious for long. He opened his eyes to sunlight and sky and fluffy clouds, and he suddenly knew that his parents had left him. They’d walked on, leaving him behind like an injured commando on a raid into enemy territory, afraid that he would slow them down and give the dead things a chance—
And then his mother’s face appeared above his and her tears dropped onto his cheeks. “Jackie,” she said, smiling, and Jack could hear the love in her voice. He did not know how—it did not sound any different than usual—but out here, lost in a dying landscape, he knew that she loved him totally. She would never leave him behind. She would rather die.
“I want to go home,” Jack said, his own tears mixing with his mother’s on his face. He thought of the cottage and all the good times he had spent there. It would be cold inside by now, maybe there were birds… dead birds, arrogantly roosting on plate racks and picture frames. “Mum, I want to go home. I want none of this to happen.” He held up his arms and she grabbed him, hugging him so tightly that his face was pressed into her hair, his breath squeezed out. He could smell her, a warm musk of sweat and stale perfume, and he took solace in the familiar.
“We can’t stay here too long,” his father said, but he sat down in the dirt next to his wife and son. “We’ve got to get on to Tewton.”
“To find Mandy?”
“To find safety,” his dad said. He saw Jack’s crestfallen expression and averted his eyes. “And to find Mandy.”
“She never hurt me, you know,” Jack muttered.
“She scared you, made you run away!”
“I ran away myself! Mandy didn’t make me. She only ever hurt herself!” Once more, he tried to recall his time in the woods, but the effort conjured only sensations of cold, damp and dark. Ironically, he could remember what happened afterward with ease—the coughing, the fevers, the nightmares, Mandy by his bed, his shouting parents, Mandy running down their driveway, leaving her home behind—but still a day and a night were missing from his life.
It was a pointless argument, a dead topic, an aimless one. So nothing more was said.
They were silent for a while, catching their breath and all thinking their own thoughts. His mother continued to rock him in her lap, but Jack knew she was elsewhere, thinking other things. His dad had broken open the shotgun and was making sure the two cartridges in there were new.
“How do you kill a dead thing, Dad?” Jack asked. A perfectly simple question, he thought. Logical. Reasonable.
His dad looked across the fields. “Tewton should be a few miles that way,” he said. He looked at his watch, then up at the sun where it hung low over the hills. “We could make it by tonight if we reall
y push it.”
Jack’s mum began to cry. She pulled a great clod of mud from one of her slippers and threw it at the ground. “We can’t go that far alone,” she said. “Not on foot. Gray, we don’t know what’s happened, not really. They’ll come and help us, cure everyone, send us home.”
” They?”
“You know what I mean.”
“There was a film called Them once,” Jack said. “About giant ants and nuclear bombs. It was nothing like this, though.” Even as he spoke it, he thought maybe he was mistaken. He thought maybe the film was very much like this, a monstrous horror of humankind’s abuse of nature, and the harvest of grief it reaped.
“It’s all so sudden,” his dad said then. Jack actually saw his shoulders droop, his head dip down, as if he were being shrunken and reduced by what had happened. “I don’t think there’s much help around, not out here. Not yet.”
“It’ll be all right in Tewton,” Jack said quietly. “Mandy said it was safe there. She phoned us because she was worried, so we’ve got to go. I don’t want to stay out in the dark. Not after last night, Mum. Remember the noises?”
His mother nodded and tightened her lips.
“I don’t want to know what made those noises.” Jack felt close to tears once more, but he could not let them come, he would not.
A breeze came up and rustled through the dead young crop.
Jack jerked upright, eyes wide, mouth hanging open.
There was something around the corner of the reshaped field, out of sight behind a clump of trees. He could not hear it, or smell it exactly, but he knew it was dead, and he knew it was moving this way.
“Mum,” he said. “Dad. There’s something coming.”
They looked around and listened hard, his dad tightening his grip on the shotgun. “I can’t—”
“There!” Jack said, pointing across the field a second before something walked into view.
His mother gasped. “Oh, no.”
His dad stood and looked behind them, judging how far it was to the hedge.
Eight people emerged from the hidden leg of the field, one after another. There were men and women and one child. All of them moved strangely, as if they only just learned how to walk, and most of them wore night clothes. The exceptions were a policeman—his uniform torn and muddied—and someone dressed in a thick sweater, ripped jeans and a bobble hat. He had something dangling from his left hand; it could have been a leash, but there was no dog.
One of the women had fresh blood splattered across the front of her nightgown.
The child was chewing something bloody. Flies buzzed around his head, but none seemed to be landing.
Perhaps, Jack thought, the flies are dead as well.
The people did not pause. They walked straight at Jack and his parents, arms swinging by their sides from simple motion, not habit.
“I doubt they can run that fast,” Jack’s dad said.
“I’m scared,” his mother whispered.
“But can they get through the hedge, Dad? Once we’re through, will they follow us?”
Jack looked from the people to the hedge, and back again. He knew what was wrong with them—they were dead and they craved live food, his parents had learned all that from the news yesterday—but still he did not want to believe.
Their nostrils did not flare, their mouths hung open but did not drool, their feet plodded insistently… but not aimlessly. These dead things had a purpose, it seemed, and that purpose would be in their eyes, were they moist enough to throw back reflections.
“They’re looking at us,” Jack said quietly.
They walked slowly, coming on like wind-up toys with broken innards; no life in their movements at all.
Seconds later, they charged.
Whatever preconceptions Jack had about the ability of dead things to move were slaughtered here and now. The dead folk did not run, they rampaged, churning up the earth with heavy footfalls, shattering the strange peace with the suddenness of their movement. Yet their faces barely changed, other than the slack movement of their jaws snapping shut each time their feet struck mud. They did not shout or pant because, Jack guessed, they had no breath.
His dad fired the shotgun and then they all ran toward the hedge. Jack did not see what effect the shot had; he did not want to. He could sense the distance rapidly closing between them. The hedge seemed a hundred steps away, a thousand miles, and then he saw his father slowly dropping behind.
“Dad, come on!”
“Run, Jackie!”
“Dad!” He was fumbling with the shotgun, Jack saw, plucking out the spent cartridges and trying to load fresh ones. “Dad, don’t bother, just run!”
“Gray, Gray,” he heard his mother panting under her breath, but she did not turn around. She reached the hedge first and launched herself at what she thought was an easy gap to squeeze through. She squealed, and then screamed, when she became impaled on barbed wire and sharp sticks.
Jack was seconds from the hedge but his dad was now out of sight, behind him and to the left. Jack was watching his feet so he did not trip, but in his mind’s eye he saw something else: his father caught, then trampled, then gnawed into, eaten alive while he lay there broken-backed and defenseless…
He reached the hedge but did not slow down. Instead he jumped, scrabbling with his hands and feet even before he struck the tangled growth, hauling himself up and through the sharp thorns, the biting branches, the crisp spring foliage. Bloody tears sprang from cuts on his hands and arms.
“Mum!” he shouted as he tumbled over the other side. The breath was knocked from him as he landed, and he crawled back to the hedge in a kind of silent, airless void.
As he found his breath, he heard the blast of the shotgun once more. Something hit the ground.
His mum was struggling in the heart of the hedge and Jack went to her aid. She was already cut and bleeding, the splashes of blood vivid against withered leaves and rotting buds. “Stop struggling!” he shouted.
The shotgun again.
“Dad!”
He could see glimpses of frantic movement through the hedge—
And then he knew it was going to be all right. Not forever—in the long term everything was dark and lonely and different—but for now they would all pull through. He saw his bloodied parents hugging each other, felt the coolness of blood on his neck, smelled the scent of death receding as they left the mindless dead behind to feed on other things. He also saw a place where everything would be fine, but he had no idea how to get there.
“Jack, help me!” his mother shouted, and everything rushed back. He reached out and grabbed her arms, and although she screamed, still he pulled.
The hedge moved and shuddered as bodies crashed into it on the other side. He could not see his dad, but he did not worry; there was nothing to worry about (yet, nothing to worry about yet) and then he came scrambling over, throwing the shotgun to the ground and following close behind.
His mother came free with a final harsh scream. Jack saw the wounds on her arms and shoulders where the barbed wire had slashed in and torn out, and he began to cry.
“Oh, Janey,” his dad said, hugging his wife and letting his tears dilute her blood. Jack closed his eyes because his mum was bleeding… she was hurt and she was bleeding… But then she was hugging him and her blood cooled on his skin.
“Come on, I don’t want to stay here a minute longer,” his father said. “And maybe they’ll find a way through. Maybe.”
They hurried along the perimeter of the new field, keeping a wary look out in case this place, too, had occupants ready to chase them into the ground.
Jack looked back only once. Shapes were silhouetted on and in the hedge like grotesque fruits, their arms twitching uselessly, clothes and skin stretched and torn on barbed wire and dead wood.
He did not look again, but he heard their struggles for a long while. By the time he and his family reached the gate that led out into a little country lane, their stench had
been carried away on the breeze.
The lane looked unused, but at least it was a sign of humanity.
Jack was so glad to see it.
They turned east. Jack wondered at his conviction that there was something dangerous approaching, moments before the crowd had rounded the corner in the field. He had smelled them, of course, that was it. Or perhaps he had heard them. He had a good sense of hearing, his mother always said so.
Or perhaps he had simply known that they were there.
His mother and father were walking close together behind him, almost rubbing shoulders. Almost, but not quite, because his mum’s arm was a mess. There was blood dripping from her fingertips as they walked, and Jack had seen her shoulder where a flap of skin hung down across her armpit, and he’d seen the meat of her there where the barbed wire had torn her open.
It didn’t hurt, she said. It was numb, but it didn’t hurt. Jack knew from the way she talked that the numbness would not last. Once the shock had worn off and the adrenaline drained from her system, the slow fire would ignite and the pain would come in surges. For his mother, the future was a terrifying place promising nothing but worse to come.
Total silence surrounded them. The landscape had taken on an eerie appearance, one normally reserved for the strangest of autumn evenings, when the sun was sinking behind wispy clouds and the moon had already revealed itself. The hills in the distance were smothered in mist, only occasional smudges of green showing through like old bruises. Nearer by, clumps of trees sprouted on ancient hillocks. The trees were all old, Jack knew, otherwise the farmers would have cut them down; but today they looked positively ancient. Today they looked fossilized, petrified like the wood his friend Jamie had brought back from his holiday in the Dominican Republic the year before, wood so old it was like stone.
What would those trees feel like now? Jack wondered. Would their trunks be cold and dry as rock, or was there still that electric dampness of something alive? Were their leaves as green and fresh and vibrant as they should be in the spring… or were they as dead inside as the young harvest across the fields?
