by Tim Lebbon
Just before midday they emerged suddenly from the woods and found themselves at the top of the hill, looking down into a wide, gentle valley. The colors here had gone as well; it looked like a fine film of ash had smothered everything in sight, from the nearest tree to the farthest hillside. In the distance, hunkered down behind a roll in the land as if hiding itself away, they could just make out the uppermost spires and roofs of Tewton. From this far away it was difficult to see whether there were any signs of life. Jack thought not, but he tried not to look too hard in case he was right.
“Let’s take a rest here, Jackie,” his dad said. “Let’s sit and look.” Jack’s mum used that saying when they were on holiday, the atmosphere and excitement driving Jack and Mandy into a frenzy, his dad eager to find a pub, an eternity of footpaths and sight-seeing stretched out before them. Let’s just sit and look, she had said, and they had heeded her words and simply enjoyed the views and surroundings for what they were. Here and now there was nothing he wanted to sit and look at. The place smelled bad, there were no sounds other than their own labored breathing, the landscape was a corpse laid out on a slab, perhaps awaiting identification, begging burial. There was nothing here he wanted to see.
But they sat and looked, and when Jack’s heartbeat settled back to normal, he realized that he could no longer hear his father’s breathing.
He held his breath. Stared down at the ground between his legs, saw the scattered dead beetles and ants, and the ladybirds without any flame in their wings. He had never experienced such stillness, such silence. He did not want to look up, did not want events to move on to whatever he would find next. Dad dead, he named. Me on my own. Me, burying Dad.
Slowly, he raised his head.
His father was asleep. His breathing was long and slow and shallow, a contented slumber or the first signs of his body running down, following his wife to that strange place which had recently become even stranger. He remained sitting upright and his hands still clasped the gun, but his chin was resting on his chest, his shoulders rising and falling, rising and falling, so slightly that Jack had to watch for a couple of minutes to make sure.
He could not bear to think of his father not waking up. He went to touch him on the shoulder, but wondered what the shock would do.
They had to get to Tewton. They were here—hell, he could even see it—but still they found no safety. If there was help to be had, it must be where Mandy had said it would be.
Jack stood, stepped from foot to foot, looked around as if expecting help to come galloping across the funereal landscape on a white charger. Then he gently lifted the binoculars from his dad’s neck, negotiated the strap under his arms, and set off along the hillside. Ten minutes, he figured, if he walked for ten minutes he would be able to see what was happening down in Tewton. See the hundreds of people rushing hither and tither, helping the folks who had come in from the dead countryside, providing food and shelter and some scrap of normality among the insanity. There would be soldiers there, and doctors, and tents in the streets because there were too many survivors to house in the buildings. There would be food as well, tons of it ferried in by helicopter, blankets and medicines… maybe a vaccine… or a cure.
But there were no helicopters. And there were no sounds of life.
He saw more dead things on the way, but he had nothing to fear from them. Yesterday dead had been dangerous, an insane, impossible threat; now it was simply no more. Today, the living were unique.
Jack looked down on the edge of the town. A scattering of houses and garages and gardens spewed out into the landscape from between the low hills. There was a church there as well, and a row of shops with smashed windows, and several cars parked badly along the two streets he could see.
He lowered the binoculars and oriented himself from a distance, then looked again. A road wound into town from this side, trailing back along the floor of the valley before splitting in two, one of these arteries climbing toward the woods he and his father had just exited. Jack frowned, moved back to where the road passed between two rows of houses into the town, the blurred vision setting him swaying like a sunflower in the breeze.
He was shaking. The vibration knocked him out of focus. There was a cool hand twisting his insides and drawing him back the way he had come, not only to his father, but to his dead mother as well. It was as if she were calling him across the empty miles that now separated them, pleading that he not leave her alone in that strange color-splashed cottage, singing her love to tunes of guilt and with a chorus of childlike desperation so strong that it made him feel sick. However grown up Jack liked to think he was, all he wanted at that moment was his mother. And in a way he was older than his years, because he knew he would feel like that whatever his age.
Tears gave him a fluid outlook. He wiped his eyes roughly with his sleeve and looked again, breathing in deeply and letting his breath out in a long, slow sigh.
There were people down there. A barricade of some sort had been thrown across the road just where houses gave way to countryside—there was a car, and some furniture, and what looked like fridges and cookers—and behind this obstruction heads bobbed, shapes moved. Jack gasped and smiled and began to shake again, this time with excitement.
Mandy must be down there somewhere, waiting for them to come in. When she saw it was just Jack and his dad she would know the truth, they would not need to tell her, but as a family they could surely pull through, help each other and hold each other and love each other as they always should have.
Jack began to run back to his dad. He would wake him and together they would go the final mile.
The binoculars banged against his hip and he fell, crunching dry grass, skidding down the slope and coming to rest against a hedge. A shower of dead things pattered down on his face, leaves and twigs and petrified insects. His mum would wipe them away. She would spit on her handkerchief and dab at the cuts on his face, scold him for running when he should walk, tell him to read a book instead of watching the television.
He stood and started off again, but then he heard a voice.
“Jack.”
It came from afar, faint, androgynous with distance and panic. He could hear that well enough; he could hear the panic.
“Jack.”
He looked uphill toward the forest, expecting to see the limp figure of his mother edge out from beneath the trees’ shadows, coming at him from the woods.
“Jack!”
The voice was louder now and accompanied by something else—the rhythmic slap slap slap of running feet.
Jack looked down the hill and made out something behind a hedge denuded of leaves. Lifting the binoculars he saw his father running along the road, hands pumping at the air, feet kicking up dust.
“Dad!” he called, but his father obviously did not hear. He disappeared behind a line of brown evergreens.
Jack tracked the road through the binoculars, all the way to Tewton. His dad must have woken up, found him missing and assumed he’d already made his way to the town, eager to see Mandy, or just too grief-stricken to wait any longer. Now he was on his way into town on his own, and when he arrived he would find Jack absent. He would panic. He would think himself alone, alone but for Mandy. How would two losses in one day affect him?
His dad emerged farther down the hillside, little more than a smudge against the landscape now, still running and still calling.
Jack ran as well. He figured if he moved as the crow flies they would reach the barricade at the same time. Panic over. Then they would find Mandy.
He tripped again, cursed, hauled the binoculars from his shoulder and threw them away. As he stood and ran on down the hill, he wondered whether they would ever be found. He guessed not. He guessed they’d stay here forever, and one day they would be a fossil. There were lots of future fossils being made today.
He could no longer see his dad, but he could see the hedgerow hiding the road that led into Tewton. His feet were carrying him away, moving too fast, and
at some point Jack lost control. He was no longer running, he was falling, plummeting down the hillside in a reckless dash that would doubtless result in a broken leg—at least—should he lose his footing again. He concentrated on the ground just ahead of him, tempted to look down the hillside at the road but knowing he should not. He should watch out for himself, for if he broke a limb now and there were no doctors in Tewton…
As the slope of the hill lessened so he brought his dash under control. His lungs were burning with exertion and he craved a drink. He did not stop running, though, because the hedge was close now, a tangled, bramble-infested maze of dead twigs and crumbling branches.
Tewton was close too. He could see rooftops to his right, but little else. He’d be at the barricade in a matter of minutes.
He hoped, how he hoped that Mandy was there to greet them. She and their father would have made up already, arms around each other, smiling sad smiles. I’ve named my fears, Jack would tell her, and though their father would not understand they would smile at each other and hug, and he would tell her how what she had told him had saved him from going mad.
He reached the hedge and ran along it until he found a gate. His knees were flaring with pain, his chest tight and fit to burst, but he could see the road. He climbed the gate—there was a dead badger on the other side; not roadkill, just dead, and thankfully un-moving—and jumped into the lane.
It headed around a bend, and he was sure he heard pounding footsteps for a few seconds. It may have been his heart; it was thumping at his chest, urging him on, encouraging him to safety. He listened to it and hurried along the lane, moving at a shuffle now, more than a run.
As he rounded the bend everything came into view.
The people first of all, a couple of them still dragging themselves from the drainage reens either side of the road, several more converging on his father. He stood several steps from the barricade, glancing frantically around, obviously searching for Jack but seeing only dead people circling him, staring at him.
“Dad!” Jack shouted, at least he tried to. It came out as a gasp, fear and dread and defeat all rolled into one exhalation. Tewton… hope… help, all given way to these dead things. For a fleeting instant he thought the barricade was a dividing line behind which hope may still exist, but then he saw that it wasn’t really a barricade at all. It may have been once, maybe only hours ago, but now it was broken down and breached. Little more than another pile of rubbish that would never be cleared.
“Dad!” This time it was a shout. His dad spun around, and it almost broke Jack’s heart to see the relief on his face. But then fear regained its hold and his dad began to shout.
“Jack, stay away, they’re here, look! Stay away, Jack!”
“But, Dad—”
His father fired the shotgun and one of the dead people hit the road. It—Jack could not even discern its sex—squirmed and slithered, unable to regain its feet.
Mandy, he thought, where’s Mandy, what of Mandy?
Mandy dead, Mandy gone, only me and Dad left—
But the naming of his fears did him no good, because he was right to be afraid. He knew that when he heard the sounds behind him. He knew it when he turned and saw Mandy scrabbling out from the ditch, her long black hair clotted with dried leaves, her grace hobbled by death.
“Mandy,” he whispered, and he thought she paused.
There was another gunshot behind him and the sound of metal hitting something soft. Then running feet coming his way. He hoped they were his father’s. He remembered the dead people in the field yesterday, how fast they had moved, how quickly they had charged.
Mandy was gray and pale and thin. Her eyes showed none of his sister, her expression was not there, he could not sense her at all. Her silver rings rattled loose on long stick fingers. She was walking toward him.
“Mandy, Mandy, it’s me, Jack—”
“Jack! Move!” His father’s words were slurred because he was running, it was his footsteps Jack could hear. And then he heard a shout, a curse.
He risked a glance over his shoulder. His father had tripped and slid across the lane on his hands and knees, the shotgun clattering into the ditch, three of the dead folk closing on him from behind. “Dad, behind you!” Jack shouted.
His father looked up at Jack, his eyes widened, his mouth hung open, his hands bled. “Behind you!” he shouted back.
A weight struck Jack and he went sprawling. He half turned as he fell so that he landed on his side, and he looked up and back in time to see Mandy toppling over on top of him. The wind was knocked from him and for a few seconds his chest felt tight, useless, dead.
Perhaps this is what it’s like, he thought. To be like them.
At last he drew a shuddering breath, and the stench of Mandy hit him at the same time. The worst thing… the worst thing of all… was that he could detect a subtle hint of Obsession beneath the dead animal smell of her. His mum and dad always bought Obsession for Mandy at the airport when they went on holiday, and Jack had had a big box of jelly-fruits.
He felt her hands clawing at him, fingers seeking his throat, bony knees jarring into his stomach, his crotch. He screamed and struggled but could not move, Mandy had always beaten him at wrestling, she was just so strong—
“Get off!” his dad shouted. Jack could not see what was happening—he had landed so that he looked along the lane away from Tewton—but he could hear. “Get the fuck off, get away!” A thump as something soft hit the ground, then other sounds less easily identifiable, like an apple being stepped on or a leg torn from a cooked chicken. Then the unmistakable metallic snap of the shotgun being broken, reloaded, closed.
Two shots in rapid succession.
“Oh God, oh God, oh… Jack, it’s not Mandy, Jack, you know that don’t you!”
Jack struggled onto his back and looked up at the thing atop him.
You can name your fears, Mandy had said, and Jack could not bear to look. This bastard thing resembling his beautiful sister was a travesty, a crime against everything natural and everything right.
Jack closed his eyes. “I still love you Mandy,” he said, but he was not talking to the thing on top of him now.
There was another blast from the shotgun. A weight landed on his chest, something sprinkled down across his face. He kept his eyes closed. The weight twisted for a while, squirmed and scratched at Jack with nails and something else, exposed bones perhaps—
A hand closed around his upper arm and pulled.
Jack screamed, shouted until his throat hurt. Maybe he could scare it off. “It’s alright, Jackie,” a voice whispered into his ear. Mandy had never called him Jackie, so why now, why when—
Then he realized it was his father’s voice. Jack opened his eyes as he stood and looked straight into his dad’s face. They stared at each other because they both knew to stare elsewhere—to stare down—would invite images they could never, ever live with.
They held hands as they ran along the lane, away from Tewton. For a while there were sounds of possible pursuit behind them, but they came from a distance and Jack simply could not bring himself to look.
They ran for a very long time. For a while Jack felt like he was going mad, or perhaps it was clarity in a world gone mad itself. In his mind’s eye he saw the dead people of Tewton waiting in their little town, waiting for the survivors to flee there from the countryside, slaughtering and eating them, taking feeble strength from cooling blood and giving themselves a few more hours before true death took them at last. The image gave him a strange sense of hope because he saw it could not go on forever. Hope in the death of the dead. A strange place to take comfort.
At last they could run no more. They found a petrol station and collapsed in the little shop, drinking warm cola because the electricity was off, eating chocolate and crisps. They rested until midafternoon. Then, because they did not know what else to do, they moved on once more
.
Jack held his father’s hand. They walked along
a main road, but there was no traffic. At one junction they saw a person nailed high up on an old telegraph pole. Jack began to wonder why but then gave in because he knew he would never know.
The countryside began to flatten out. A few miles from where they were was the coast, an aim as good as any now, a place where help may have landed.
“You okay to keep going, son?”
Jack nodded. He squeezed his dad’s hand as well. But he could not bring himself to speak. He had said nothing since they’d left the petrol station. He could not. He was too busy trying to remember what Mandy looked like, imprint her features on his mind so that he would never, ever forget.
There were shapes wandering the fields of dead crops. Jack and his dad increased their pace but the dead people were hardly moving, and they seemed to pose no threat. He kept glancing back as they fell behind. It looked like they were harvesting what they had sown.
As the sun hit the hillsides behind them they saw something startling in the distance. It looked like a flash of green, small but so out of place among this blandness that it stood out like an emerald in ash. They could not run because they were exhausted, but they increased their pace until they drew level with the field.
In the center of the field stood a scarecrow, very lifelike, straw hands hidden by gloves and face painted with a soppy sideways grin. Spread out around its stand was an uneven circle of green shoots. The green was surrounded by the rest of the dead crop, but it was alive, it had survived.
“Something in the soil, maybe?” Jack said.
“Farming chemicals?”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe we could go and see.”
“Look,” his dad said, pointing out towards the scarecrow.
Jack frowned, saw what his dad had seen, then saw the trail leading to it. It headed from the road, a path of crushed shoots aiming directly out toward the scarecrow. It did not quite reach it, however, and at the end of the trail something was slumped down in the mud, just at the boundary of living and dead crop. Jack thought he saw hair shifting in the breeze, the hem of a jacket lifting, dropping, lifting again, as if waving.
