by Tim Lebbon
“We’ll go and find out.”
“Dad, it might be dangerous. There might be… those people there. Those things.” Dead things, Jack thought, but the idea of dead things walking still seemed too ridiculous to voice.
“We need food, Jack,” his dad said, glancing at his mother as he said it. “And a drink. And some bandages for your mum, if we can find some. We need help.”
“I’m scared. Why can’t we just go on to Tewton?”
“And when we get there, and there are people moving around in the streets, will you want to hold back then? In case they’re the dead things we’ve seen?”
Jack did not answer, but he shook his head because he knew his dad was right.
“I’ll go on ahead slightly,” his dad said. “I’ve got the gun. That’ll stop anything that comes at us. Jack, you help your mum.”
Didn’t stop the other people, Jack thought. And you couldn’t shoot at Mrs. Haswell, could you, Dad? Couldn’t shoot at someone you knew.
“Don’t go too fast,” his mum said quietly. “Gray, I can’t walk too fast. I feel faint, but if I walk slowly I can keep my head clear.”
He nodded, then started off, holding the shotgun across his stomach now instead of dipped over his elbow. Jack and his mother held back for a while and watched him go, Jack thinking how small and scared he looked against the frightening landscape.
“You all right, Mum?”
She nodded but did not turn her head. “Come on, let’s follow your dad. In ten minutes we’ll be having a nice warm cup of tea and some bread in the farmer’s kitchen.”
“But what’s he burning? Why the bonfire?”
His mother did not answer, or could not. Perhaps she was using all her energy to walk. Jack did the only thing he could and stayed along beside her.
The lane crossed a B-road and then curved around to the farmyard, bounded on both sides by high hedges. There was no sign of any traffic, no hint that anyone had come this way recently. Jack looked to his left where the road rose slowly up out of the valley. In the distance he saw something walk from one side to the other, slowly, as if unafraid of being run down. It may have been a deer, but Jack could not be sure.
“Look,” his mum said quietly. “Oh Jackie, look.”
There was an area of tended plants at the entrance to the farm lane, rose bushes pointing skeletal thorns skyward and clematis smothered in pink buds turning brown. But it was not this his mother was pointing at with a finger covered in blood; it was the birds. There were maybe thirty of them, sparrows from what Jack could make out, though they could just as easily have been siskins that had lost their color. They flapped uselessly at the air, heads jerking with the effort, eyes like small black stones. They did not make a sound, and that is perhaps why his father had not seen them as he walked by. Or maybe he had seen them and chosen to ignore the sight. Their wings were obviously weak, their muscles wasting. They did not give in. Even as Jack and his mother passed by they continued to flap uselessly at air that no longer wished to support them.
Jack kept his eyes on them in case they followed.
They could smell the bonfire now, and tendrils of smoke wafted across the lane and into the fields on either side. “That’s not a bonfire,” Jack said. “I can’t smell any wood.” His mother began to sob as she walked. Jack did not know whether it was from her pain, or something else entirely.
A gunshot coughed at the silence. Jack’s father crouched down low, twenty paces ahead of them. He brought his gun up but there was no smoke coming from the barrel. “Wait—!” he shouted, and another shot rang out. Jack actually saw the hedge next to his dad flicker as pellets tore through.
“Get away!” a voice said from a distance. “Get out of here! Get away!”
His dad backed down the lane, still in a crouch, signaling for Jack and his mum to back up as well. “Wait, we’re all right, we’re normal. We just want some help.”
There was silence for a few seconds, then another two aimless shots in quick succession. “I’ll kill you!” the voice shouted again, and Jack could tell its owner was crying. “You killed my Janice, you made me kill her again, and I’ll kill you!”
Jack’s dad turned and ran to them, keeping his head tucked down as if his shoulders would protect it against a shotgun blast. “Back to the road,” he said.
“But we could reason with him.”
“Janey, back to the road. The guy’s burning his own cattle and some of them are still moving. Back to the road.”
“Some of them are still moving,” Jack repeated, fascination and disgust—two emotions which, as a young boy, he was used to experiencing in tandem—blurring his words.
“Left here,” his father said as they reached the B-road. “We’ll skirt around the farm and head up toward the woods. Tewton is on the other side of the forest.”
“There’s a big hill first, isn’t there?” his mum said. “A steep hill?”
“It’s not that steep.”
“However steep it is…” But his mum trailed off, and when Jack looked at her he saw tears on her cheeks. A second glance revealed the moisture to be sweat, not tears. It was not hot, hardly even warm. He wished she was crying instead of sweating.
His father hurried them along the road until the farm was out of sight. The smell of the fire faded into the background scent of the countryside, passing over from lush and alive, to wan and dead. Jack could still not come to terms with what he was seeing. It was as if his eyes were slowly losing their ability to discern colors and vitality in things, the whole of his vision turning into one of those sepia-tinted photographs he’d seen in his grandmother’s house, where people never smiled and the edges were eaten away by time and too many thumbs and fingers. Except the bright red of his mother’s blood was still there, even though the hedges were pastel instead of vibrant. His dad’s face was pale, yes, but the burning spots on his cheeks—they flared when he was angry or upset, or both—were as bright as ever. Some colors, it seemed, could not be subsumed so easily.
“We won’t all fade away, will we, Dad? You won’t let me and Mum and Mandy fade away, will you?”
His dad frowned, then ruffled his hair and squeezed the back of his neck. “Don’t worry, son. We’ll get to Tewton and everything will be all right. They’ll be doing something to help, they’re bound to. They have to.”
“Who are ‘they,’ Dad?” Jack said, echoing his mum’s question from that morning.
His dad shook his head. “Well, the government. The services, you know, the police and fire brigade.”
Maybe they’ve faded away too. Jack thought. He did not say anything. It seemed he was keeping a lot of his thoughts to himself lately, making secrets. Instead, he tried naming some of his fears—they seemed more expansive and numerous every time he thought about them—but there was far too much he did not know. Fear is like pain, Mandy had told him. Maybe that’s why his mum was hurting so much now. Maybe that’s why he felt so much like crying. Underneath all the running around and the weirdness of today, perhaps he was truly in pain.
They followed the twisting road for ten minutes before hearing the sound of approaching vehicles.
“Stand back,” Jack’s dad said, stretching out and ushering Jack and his mum up against the hedge. Jack hated the feel of the dead leaves and buds against the back of his neck. They felt like long fingernails, and if he felt them move… if he felt them twitch and begin to scratch…
The hedges were high and overgrown here, though stark and sharp in death, and they did not see the cars until they were almost upon them. They were both battered almost beyond recognition, paint scoured off to reveal rusting metal beneath. It’s as if even the cars are dying, Jack thought, and though it was a foolish notion it chilled him and made him hug his dad.
His dad brought up the gun. Jack could feel him shaking. He could feel the fear there, the tension in his legs, the effort it was taking for him to breathe.
“Dad?” he said, and he was going to ask what was w
rong. He was going to ask why was he pointing a gun at people who could help them, maybe give them a lift to Tewton.
“Oh dear God,” his mum said, and Jack heard the crackle as she leaned back against the hedge.
There were bodies tied across the bonnets of each car. He’d seen pictures of hunters in America, returning to town with deer strapped across the front of their cars, parading through the streets with kills they had made. This was not the same because these bodies were not kills. They were dead, yes, but not kills, because their heads rolled on their necks, their hands twisted at the wrist, their legs shook and their heels banged on the hot metal beneath them.
Jack’s father kept his gun raised. The cars slowed and Jack saw the faces inside, young for the most part, eyes wide and mouths open in sneers of rage or fear or mockery, whatever it was Jack could not tell. Living faces, but mad as well.
“Wanna lift?” one of the youths shouted through the Hal’s smashed windscreen.
“I think we’ll walk,” Jack’s dad said.
“It’s not safe.” The cars drifted to a standstill. “These fuckers are everywhere. Saw them eating a fucking bunch of people on the motorway. Ran them over.” He leaned through the windscreen and patted the dead woman’s head. She stirred, her eyes blank and black, skin ripped in so many places it looked to Jack like she was shedding. “So, you wanna lift?”
“Where are you going?” Jack asked.
The boy shrugged. He had a bleeding cut on his face; Jack was glad. The dead didn’t bleed. “Dunno. Somewhere where they can figure out what these fuckers are about.”
“Who are ‘they’?” Jack’s dad asked.
The youth shrugged again, his bravado diluted by doubt. His eyes glittered and Jack thought he was going to cry, and suddenly he wished the youth would curse again, shout and be big and brave and defiant.
“We’ll walk. We’re going to Tewton.”
“Yes, Mandy rang and said it’s safe there!” Jack said excitedly.
“Best of luck to you then, little man,” the driver said.
Then he accelerated away. The second car followed, frightened faces staring out. The cars—the dead and the living—soon passed out of sight along the road.
“Into the fields again,” Jack’s dad said. “Up the hill to the woods. It’s safer there.”
Safer among dead things than among the living, Jack thought. Again, he kept his thought to himself. Again, they started across the fields.
They saw several cows standing very still in the distance, not chewing, not snorting, not flicking their tails. Their udders hung slack and empty, teats already black. They seemed to be looking in their direction. None of them moved. They looked like photos Jack had seen of the concrete cows in Milton Keynes, though those looked more lifelike.
It took an hour to reach the edge of the woods. Flies buzzed them but did not bite, the skies were empty of birds, things crawled along at the edges of fields, where dead crops met dead hedges.
The thought of entering the woods terrified Jack, though he could not say why. Perhaps it was a subconscious memory of the time he had been lost in the woods. That time had been followed by a mountain of heartache. Maybe he was anticipating the same now.
Instead, as they passed under the first stretch of dipping trees, they found a house, and a garden and more bright colors than Jack had names for.
“Look at that! Janey, look at that! Jack, see, I told you, it’s not all bad!” The cottage was small, its roof slumped in the middle and its woodwork painted a bright, cheery yellow. The garden was a blazing attack of color, and for a while Jack thought he was seeing something from a fairy tale. Roses were only this red in stories, beans this green, grass so pure, ivy so darkly gorgeous across two sides of the house. Only in fairy tales did potted plants stand in windowsill ranks so perfectly, their petals kissing each other but never stealing or leeching color from their neighbor. Greens and reds and blues and violets and yellows, all stood out against the backdrop of the house and the limp, dying woods behind it. In the woods there were still colors, true, vague echoes of past glories clinging to branches or leaves or fronds. But this garden, Jack thought, must be where all the color in the world had fled, a Noah’s Ark for every known shade and tint and perhaps a few still to be discovered. There was magic in this place.
“Oh, wow,” his mum said. She was smiling, and Jack was glad. But his father, who had walked to the garden gate and pulled an overhanging rose stem to his nose, was no longer smiling. His expression was as far away from a smile as could be.
“It’s not real,” his dad said.
“What?”
“This rose isn’t real. It’s… synthetic. It’s silk, or something.”
“But the grass, Dad…”
Jack ran to the gate as his father pushed through it, and they hit the lawns together.
“Astroturf. Like they use on football pitches, sometimes. Looks pretty real, doesn’t it, son?”
“The beans. The fruit trees, over there next to the cottage.”
“Beans and fruit? In spring?”
Jack’s mum was through the gate now, using her one good hand to caress the plants, squeeze them and watch them spring back into shape, bend them and hear the tiny snap as a plastic stem broke. Against the fake colors of the fake plants, she looked very pale indeed.
Jack ran to the fruit bushes and tried to pluck one of the red berries hanging there in abundance. It was difficult parting it from its stem, but it eventually popped free and he threw it straight into his mouth. He was not really expecting a burst of fruity flesh, and he was not proved wrong. It tasted like the inside of a yogurt carton: plastic and false.
“It’s not fair!” Jack ran to the front door of the cottage and hammered on the old wood, ignoring his father’s hissed words of caution from behind him. His mum was poorly, they needed some food and drink, there were dead things—dead things, for fucking hell’s sake—walking around and chasing them and eating people. Saw them eating a fucking bunch of people on the motorway, the man in the car had said.
All that, and now this, and none of it was fair.
The door drifted open. There were good smells from within, but old smells as well: the echoes of fresh bread; the memory of pastries; a vague idea that chicken had been roasted here recently, though surely not today and probably not yesterday.
“There’s no one here!” Jack called over his shoulder.
“They might be upstairs.”
Jack shook his head. No, he knew this place was empty. He’d known the people in the field were coming and he’d seen what the dead folk in the banana car were like before… before he saw them for real. And he knew that this cottage was empty.
He went inside.
His parents dashed in after him, even his poor mum. He felt bad about making her rush, but once they were inside and his dad had looked around, they knew they had the place to themselves.
“It’s just not fair,” Jack said once again, elbows resting on a windowsill in the kitchen, chin cradled in cupped hands. “All those colors…”
There was a little bird in the garden, another survivor drawn by the colors. It was darting here and there, working at the fruit, pecking at invisible insects, fluttering from branch to plastic branch in a state of increasing agitation.
“Why would someone do this?” his mum asked. She was sitting at the pitted wooden table with a glass of orange juice and a slice of cake. Real juice, real cake. “Why construct a garden so false?”
“I feel bad about just eating their stuff,” his dad said. “I mean, who knows who lives here? Maybe it’s a little old lady and she has her garden like this because she’s too frail to tend it herself. We’ll leave some money when we go.” He tapped his pockets, sighed. “You got any cash, Janey?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t think to bring any when we left this morning. It was all so… rushed.”
“Maybe everything’s turning plastic and this is just where it begins,” Jack mused. Neither
of his parents replied. “I read a book once where everything turned to glass.”
“I’ll try the TV,” his dad said after a long pause.
Jack followed him through the stuffy hallway and into the living room, a small room adorned with faded tapestries, brass ornaments and family portraits of what seemed like a hundred children. Faces smiled from the walls, hair shone in forgotten summer sunshine, and Jack wondered where all these people were now. If they were still children, were they in school? If they were grown up, were they doing what he and his parents were doing, stumbling their way through something so strange and unexpected that it forbore comprehension?
Or perhaps they were all dead. Sitting at home. Staring at their own photographs on their own walls, seeing how things used to be.
“There it is,” his dad said. “Christ, what a relic.” He never swore in front of Jack, not even damn or Christ or shit. He did not seem to notice his own standards slipping.
The television was an old wooden cabinet type, buttons and dials running down one side of the screen, no remote control, years of mugs and plates having left their ghostly impressions on the veneered top. His dad plugged it in and switched it on, and they heard an electrical buzz as it wound itself up. As the picture coalesced from the soupy screen Jack’s dad glanced at his watch. “Almost six o’clock. News should be on anytime now.”
“I expect they’ll have a news flash, anyway,” Jack said confidently.
His dad did something then that both warmed his heart and disconcerted him. He laughed gently and gave him a hug, and Jack felt tears cool and shameless on his cheek. “Of course they will, son,” he said, “I’m sure they will.”
“Anything?” called his mum.
“Nearly,” Jack shouted back.
There was no sound. The screen was stark and bland, and the bottom half stated: “This is a Government Announcement.” The top half of the screen contained scrolling words: “Stay calm… Remain indoors… Help is at hand… Please await further news.”
