The pub was lost to him, and he fumbled with the spare cartridges in his pockets, swerving away from lurching shapes and shadows. The visibility was no further than the reach of his arms. The mist was freezing and obscured the sky and the buildings and the road ahead.
He stumbled in a straight line, lost and shivering, waiting for death in those abandoned streets.
*
Running through the streets, the screaming swarm behind him as the light was fading beyond the mist. He looked back, mute with the terror of slavering mouths closing upon him, kicking his legs and ignored the needling pain in his thighs and calves. His ankle, still not fully healed, throbbed as if swollen with poison. The bones of his chest were so frail he thought his ribcage would collapse if the riot of his heart quickened any more. He kept running as pains crept into his chest and a stitch formed in his side.
The mist thickened and curled around him, turning everything into grainy shadows. It smelled of stagnant water and tasted like mildew.
Howls of the infected drowned his heartbeat and the sound of his boots on the tarmac. He ran until his legs gave up on him and he tumbled to his knees by the side of the road on an unknown street, shuddering and gasping. He squatted against the side of a wrecked car and broke the shotgun barrel and emptied the spent cartridges into his lap. Then he fumbled for two of the spare rounds in his pocket, and his trembling hands struggled to load the gun. Finally, when he had closed the breech, he looked down the barrel into the swirling mist, shaking with adrenaline and the kind of fear that snapped minds if endured long enough. He thought that if some awful face emerged from the mist, his heart would stop. But nothing came out of the mist to claim him. He waited for a long time, his body slowly getting colder and his extremities numbing. It was too dangerous to return to the pub tonight, not with the infected roaming the streets.
He sagged, breathed out, and lowered the shotgun. He put one hand against the car to raise himself then started down the road. The mist billowed, touched by a sudden breeze, like fluid. Grainy and cloying. Dirty. Royce was jittery, breathing shallow mouthfuls past stiffened, dry lips. The mist whirled around his limbs, startled by his movements.
A wave of disorientation hit him. The streets all looked the same – ruined, cold and grey. Sounds echoed in the mist. Shapes glimpsed or imagined; a pair of pale white eyes melted away, and quick footfalls in every direction. Sounds twisted and thrown by the mist. Everything dulled to deathly shades.
He hurried along the street. Grit crackled under his boots. Buildings were looming dark shades. Muffled sobs of the infected, high-pitched and mournful. Thin, contorted forms flitted past his vision.
A sound came through the mist; something like a baby gurgling in its throat.
Royce sucked in cold air. Footsteps seemed to approach him then veer away at the last moment. His chest squeezed his heart. He thought he saw a man praying in the mist. Demented sounds.
Some of those sounds tried to tempt him out to them.
Something screeched behind him, and he turned, staring down the barrel. He fought the urge to run. A sudden epiphany that he would die out here; opened up and emptied out like a farm animal.
He stumbled away from the sound of something shuffling wetly and stood flat against a wall. He pawed slowly along the wall and slipped down a ginnel between two houses. Trampled through dead gardens in the half-light and emerged onto the next street. Shambling footsteps grew louder until their author appeared in the mist ahead of him and jerked its head towards him. Low grunts and sniffs. Royce trained the shotgun upon the figure now motionless apart from the dancing of bony fingers. A clicking in its throat, and when Royce saw its face he halted and held his breath.
The infected man was covered in dried mud and serous fluids. Most of his clothes were gone and his body was trembling and emaciated. The dark stain of his pubis below the curves of jutting rib bones. His eyes had been mauled from their sockets and the flesh of his face was shredded and swollen. His low damp breaths were strained and weak, and he stared in Royce’s direction until something else distracted him and he lurched into the mist like a broken puppet manipulated by lengths of twine.
Royce kept moving, sweeping the mist with the shotgun, his fingers numb with cold. Further on, he saw an infected person crouched over a puddle lapping from the water. He couldn’t tell, due to the warped mutations of its pallid, hairless body, if it was male or female. He moved past silently, the creature hidden again by the mist.
Further on he saw two red lights ahead. Tail lights. Patches of mist glowed red with them. He approached carefully. The car was slewed across the road, the driver’s door open, interior lights revealing empty seats. The old man was gone. Mist swirled in the headlights. The engine wasn’t running, but when he placed his hand upon the bonnet it was still warm. Royce tried the ignition, but gave up after four attempts. He followed spots of blood on the road, expecting with each step to discover the man sliced open and steaming in the cold air.
He came to an ambulance abandoned after it had mounted the kerb. A dead girl no older than ten years old sprawled with a hatchet embedded in the pulp of her face. The wail of infected pierced the mist from across streets and gardens, and the cries seemed never-ending in the echoing spaces of the dead village.
Royce entered the first house he found, a semi-detached with an opened front door. He moved slowly through the detritus of someone’s old life, past mildewed walls and dust-furred surfaces. The ceiling creaked and was veined with dark fissures spreading out from above the glass lampshade. Royce didn’t want to be under that when it came down. A leathery, dusty corpse splayed on the stairway, broken in unnatural angles, grimacing in the torchlight at its own reckoning.
Beyond the rise of the stairway, something small and quick skittered through the bedrooms then stopped, and although it was unseen, Royce imagined it listening in silence just as he was. Probably some nocturnal animal scavenging for food. Maybe a fox.
Royce didn’t go upstairs.
He stepped past a smashed cabinet full of china plates commemorating royal weddings and coronations. A remote control for the television crunched beneath one boot. He entered the kitchen and stopped, appalled at the stench of something like the fungal corruption found in old drainage pipes.
In the high corner between two walls and the ceiling was something like a spider’s nest large enough to contain an adult human. Grey and fleshy, held to the wall by strands of the same organic material, trembling with movement from something inside. A narrow slit appeared and Royce stepped back. The shotgun felt slippery in his hand. The nest bulged, split wide, and disgorged a blind, gasping thing which slopped onto the floor with its white limbs enfolded like a newborn foal. A phlegmy cough came from its mouth. It was human in shape, but its skin was mottled with grey and completely hairless. Its mouth yawned open. Razor maw. Born with teeth. Eyes the colour of flea eggs. Curved onyx claws at the end of stunted limbs.
This was something Royce hadn’t seen before. Something new, born in a spill of filth and offal. The plague had imagination.
The creature sucked the dirty air into its lungs. Amniotic fluid dripped from its quivering body and pooled on the floor. An overwhelming stink of effluent filled the room. The creature raised itself onto four limbs, shedding the shredded remains of its amniotic sac. Membranes slipped to the floor. A quadrupedal nightmare. It turned towards Royce and sniffed the air; the scent of Royce’s unwashed body, sweat and fear, excited the creature. Spools of fluid hanging from its abdomen.
The creature snapped its jaws together, clacking like dull ivory, keen for sustenance and meat, and jerked its head towards Royce. Lips pulled back from teeth. Legs straining, corded with thin muscle, ready to leap. Because it would leap and it would fall upon its prey.
It growled.
Royce raised the shotgun and its roar filled the house and mist beyond.
*
Out on the streets again and he ran in faltering strides. More scuffled footsteps from down
the street. A narrow, man-like silhouette rose from behind a ruined car, paused as if to note how much meat was on him, and then dipped out of sight. Royce rubbed at his eyes. His arms throbbed.
A gibbering white thing on splayed legs scuttled across his line of sight before it was lost in the mist.
Royce staggered up the road, relying on a failing sense of direction. His breathing was too loud. He gritted his teeth. There was a light ahead, an orb of white light about the size of a golf ball.
He slowed. The light wavered. He started towards the light. It was nestled between a pile of rubbish bags and a crumbling wall. The light shimmered, as if immersed in water.
Royce was almost upon the light when it moved away to their right, as if dragged by an unseen reel, lost in the mist. Something moved from that direction with the sound of unfolding limbs. The rustling of fabric. The light had been bait upon a hair-like filament, and the creature lunged at him from between the wrecks of two cars, feverish eyes set with insane hunger. Below its mouth, the light blinkered strobe-like.
Royce staggered away as jaws snapped at the air where his head had been. Heat and rot-stink steamed off the monster. As he stumbled into the mist, Royce glanced back and caught a glimpse of the creature. It retained a man’s shape but twisted and deformed. A bipedal, hunched form the colour of diseased meat. Palsied arms. Something awful created from the plague.
It roared as he fled.
Confused and disorientated, a fever of cold sweat upon him, he kept running, tensed for claws against the soft nape of his neck. He didn’t want to die without seeing the sky one last time.
The mist formed shapes and writhed around him. His legs throbbed and pain lanced his knees with each footfall, and the rucksack slapped against his back. Iron fingers tightened round his lungs. Each breath was fought for and taken gratefully. He was running blind into the mist, gasping for air.
He halted at a junction and looked both ways. Ridiculously, Royce thought of Green Cross Code adverts on the telly when he was a boy. That bloke who was Darth Vader, but not the voice. To his right the mist shifted with the approaching shapes of running infected. Royce went the other way as a chorus of vile mouths shrieked behind him. He dodged a man with black tendrils sprouting from the cavity of his chest. The man’s face was stretched and flushed with ecstasy as he fell to his knees and his eyes rolled back in their sockets.
Royce ran into a cul-de-sac and stumbled into a man in a torn shirt hanging in strips from his shoulders. The man lashed out at Royce with one deformed hand. More infected emerged to his left from the shadows of gardens. Royce ran for the house directly ahead, across the sodden lawn and gravel driveway, past a dead animal on the grass, and tried the front door but it was locked. He glanced back at the infected gaining upon him. He was shivering with cold and couldn’t think for the sound of his heart.
As Royce raised the shotgun to shoot the lock, a little boy emerged from around the side of the house, on all fours and naked, sniffing at the long grass. He mewled lowly, his head jerking from side-to-side, his throat swollen with something that rippled against his marble skin. What remained of his hair was in ragged tufts.
Royce froze as the boy padded onto the basalt-coloured flowerbed of dead stalks. Steam rose from his scrawny body as he scrabbled in the dirt like a carrion beetle, an awful rattling coming from the wound of his mouth. The insides of his thighs were covered in shit and dirt. Royce glanced over his shoulder at the infected massing towards him.
The boy turned his head towards him and the rattling from his mouth became a prolonged growl through teeth no longer that of a little boy’s. His face was little more than a Halloween mask of stretched skin upon sharp bones, and the skin flexed and flapped, then with a sickening heave, drew back from the lower half of his skull to reveal a maw busy with black wormlike things swaying and darting. The boy began to tremble as pale pincers burst from his flanks and stabbed at the air. Tusk-like and stained with red. He skittered towards Royce, his head caught in violent spasms.
Royce fired the shotgun as the boy reared up and shrieked. The top half of the boy’s body became red mince and splintered bone, and what remained of him slumped on the lawn, legs still kicking. A nub of white spine against the grass. Pooling innards and smeared viscera. A young life released from the plague, and that was the only comfort to Royce as he stared at what was left of the boy for what seemed like minutes, but only seconds had passed.
The infected closed in. Royce raised the shotgun.
The door flew open under the buckshot. Royce dashed inside then closed the door, heaved a dining table against it and piled wooden chairs on top. The infected slammed into the door moments later. Royce emptied the used cartridges from the breech and reloaded. The last two cartridges, he realised; the remaining rounds were back at the pub.
The window over the sink smashed inwards and several blackened limbs grasped for purchase and clawed at the air.
Royce turned and started down the hallway towards the back of the house, but halted when the back door collapsed and more shrieking figures clambered through the opening, wretched and naked, bristling with spines and tendrils. A potent stench of rot and filth entered with them. A wave of flesh and splintered limbs. The children were the worst to look upon, and their sagging faces upset him.
Royce turned to the stairs and he climbed to the next floor just as the infected reached the foot of the stairway. It was one of the hardest physical things he had ever done to climb the stairs with the infected grabbing at his heels, and he only just reached the top step without collapsing.
Once he was on the landing he stopped and turned and fired down the stairs at the mangled things climbing towards him. In the writhing mass of limbs and mouths, bodies collapsed and thrashed into an unspooling mass, raking at the wall and the banister. So many terrible mouths all wet and mealy, gibbering and mewling.
Royce pulled down the length of string attached to the attic seal and a fold up ladder dropped. He climbed the steps then looked back. As he pulled up the ladder and began to close the seal, a shockingly-thin man skittered onto the landing, lowered his skeletal face to the floor and inhaled deeply.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Royce waited in silence in the half-light of the windowless attic, crouching because the ceiling was barely tall enough for him to stand. He lit the cigarette lighter and its tiny flame animated his shadow. The infected haunted the rooms below, their insect-like clicking and whirring punctuated by the occasional grunt or bout of mournful lowing. They ran up and down the stairs, knocking and scratching at the walls, hunting him. Somewhere down there, glass smashed and there was a dull thump followed by a strangled bark. Claws scrabbling upon carpets and across the linoleum floor in the kitchen. A guttural scream sent shivers down the backs of his arms.
Later, as the night approached, the infected moved on in pursuit of other quarry.
*
Royce investigated the dark reaches of the attic, checking for other entrances. Cardboard boxes heaped against the sloping wall, filled with old Christmas decorations. The tarnished gleam of raggedy tinsel and scratched baubles. Royce felt a twinge in his chest when he looked upon the trinkets, recalling memories of previous Christmases and the opening of presents. The family dinner around the table at his parents’ house. Bad jokes and party hats in the crackers. The Queen’s speech and too much cake.
Royce searched the far end of the attic and found dusty paperback books from the Seventies; horror anthologies. A tealight with just enough of its wick to light some of the dark hours. Old vinyl records – Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, The Cure, and New Order. A souvenir programme from the 1984 FA Cup Final. Children’s toys packed into large Tupperware containers. He almost smiled when he pulled an Action Man – still clad in its British Army uniform – from underneath some old fraying curtains in a wicker basket. He wondered if all the real soldiers were dead by now.
Beyond the boxes, porcelain dolls with fixed grins and glazed eyes were half-emerged from a bu
rlap sack, all gangly legs, and blunt paws for their hands. At first he had mistaken them for dead children. It was unnerving to look at them for any length of time.
Royce sat down and stared at the tealight’s flame until its afterglow was imprinted upon his eyes. He heard the sounds of the infected above the creak of the house and the sighing attic walls around him. Royce tried to shut them out of his head. He took the old curtains from where they had been stored then sat and wrapped his body in the dusty fabric and closed his eyes. The flame burned out soon afterwards.
*
He woke in the dark, certain that the dolls had slipped from the burlap sack and were crawling towards him across the attic floor. He waited for the tickle of cold tiny fingers upon his limbs and the whisper of dust-dry voices in his ears, but they never came and after a few minutes in which his heart slowed to something normal, he was ashamed of his fear.
He stayed awake for a while and listened to the spiders inside the walls. Were they even aware of the human race’s demise? Did they sense something was wrong? Would they care even if they did know?
The Last Plague (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 6
