by Unknown
Bishop pulled to one side of the man and brought the Mazda to a halt alongside him, a few feet away. He dropped his right hand from the steering wheel and allowed it to rest on the grip of the pistol. He probed, too briefly and gently to be noticed, but sensed no danger, only bewilderment and fear.
“G’day,” Bishop said.
The man’s face immediately broke into an expression of relief and he almost bounded to the car. He bent forward, hands on thighs, to look in at Bishop.
“Man, oh, man, oh man, am I glad to see you!” he said.
Bishop regarded the man curiously. His skin was sallow, dark troughs below the eyes, but the eyes themselves, though a little wide and staring, were clear and dry. He did not cough or sniff.
“You survived, then,” Bishop murmured.
“Yeah, man. I fell ill but. . . .” He shrugged as though he hadn’t considered this until now. “I got better.”
“It appears so,” said Bishop.
The man’s face creased and it took Bishop a moment to realise that he was fighting back tears. “Everyone I know is dead, man. Can I . . . can I come with you?”
Bishop’s fingers tightened around the butt of the pistol, then relaxed as he had an idea. Maybe this man, fatigued as he was and close to tears, would be more open to suggestion. Maybe Bishop could persuade him to jump into the Yarra or step off a rooftop.
He looked intently at the man and . . . pushed.
The man’s eyes opened wider. “What the fuck. . . . ?” He took a step back, then another. “What are you doing?” The man’s eyes narrowed. “What are you?”
Bishop frowned. He had hoped that the man’s mental resistance would be so eroded as to be easily overcome. However, it seemed that they could still keep him out, at least one-on-one. No matter; they would not be able to resist the combined force of his people. And after the Great Coming. . . .
“What am I?” said Bishop. He laughed. “I am the thing under your bed. The monster in your closet. The bogeyman. . . .” He raised both hands, fingers waggling, and made a whooo sound. “I am your creator and your doom.”
The man stumbled back another couple of paces. Bishop grinned at him. With a cry of fear, the man turned and disappeared down the alleyway from which he’d emerged.
Bishop was still chuckling to himself when he arrived at the airport twenty minutes later.
* * * * *
Tom stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He looked wan, washed-out, he could do with a shave, and the skin covering his cheeks and brow looked as thin as tracing paper.
His stomach rumbled. He made his way downstairs slowly, legs shaky and unsteady, one hand clutching the banister, the other holding his duvet around his shoulders like a king’s robe. At the bottom, he sat back on the second stair to catch his breath.
Only vague recollections of the last few days played across his mind. Shadowy images of sweats and shivers, tottering expeditions to the bathroom to relieve himself and splash water on his fevered brow, nightmarish encounters with Dracula and Freddy Kruger and Lisa . . . For a moment, he tried to imagine that burying his mother wrapped in her duvet in her garden was also the product of delirium, but he knew better. The callus on the palm of his right hand attested to the blister the handle of the stolen shovel had made as he dug deep into the wet soil.
Tom blinked and swallowed quickly as the water he’d greedily drunk threatened to come back up. He swayed a little, thankful that he was sitting down.
He glanced at his front door; at the mat below it. He had no idea what day it was or for how long he had been ill, but the mat should be covered in mail, even if most of it was junk. But there was nothing at all there.
The feeling of nausea passed and he rose unsteadily. Hand leaning against the wall for support, he stagger-walked to the kitchen. The digital clock on the cooker showed the time as 14:51, but the room was cast in gloom. Rain fell heavily from rolling, black clouds and dashed against the windows like gravel. Although the blinds were open, it was more like evening than early afternoon and he flicked the overhead light switch. It was only when the room was bathed in the warm glow of the ceiling spotlights that he realised the full import of the clock and overhead lights working: the electricity was still on.
Tom breathed out heavily. He had imagined during his delirium that Armageddon had come and he was the last man to be left alive. One obvious consequence of such an occurrence would be power outages. Permanent ones if he was truly the last man standing. Tom possessed only the most hazy notion of how services like gas and electricity arrived in people’s homes and would not have the first idea where to even begin to reconnect the power if it went out.
His stomach rumbled again. He moved to the fridge and opened the door, wrinkling his nose in anticipation. The smell of sour milk was bad, but not unbearable. He took the carton out of the door and shook it. By the thick sludgy sound, he guessed that the milk had coagulated. He didn’t intend to open the carton to find out. Placing it to one side, he took a quick inventory: three cartons of yoghurt days past their use-by date; an opened tin of baked beans covered in clingfilm; a plastic container of tomatoes that had begun to dimple and shrivel; a chunk of cheddar cheese that had just started to grow a skin of blue mould that could easily be cut away; a couple of onions that felt firm enough; a three-quarter full bottle of cola; an unopened bottle of lemonade; three cans of beer; a half-drunk bottle of white wine; assorted tins of meats and fish; jars of pickles and chutneys.
Could be worse. The yoghurt, beans and tomatoes would have to go, but he could make some sort of meal from the rest. The small freezer section of the fridge contained a box of fish fingers and a loaf of sliced bread. A cupboard next to the sink contained a few cans of soup, a tin of chopped tomatoes, a bag of dried pasta and a box of rice.
Letting the duvet fall to the floor, Tom opened a can of corned beef, his fingers struggling with the key but hunger lending them strength. He turned the block of meat out onto a plate and sliced it. Almost dribbling with desire, he slowly brought a slice up to his lips. He bit off a chunk and chewed, eyes closed, savouring the fatty flavour.
He made himself pause after finishing the slice before taking the next one; although his instinct was to wolf down the meat, he didn’t want to make himself sick.
As he swallowed the last morsel of that first divine slice, and in order to divert his attention from the rest of the corned beef, he took stock.
Clearly he had fallen ill with some sort of flu-like disease. He could only assume it was the same one that had killed his mother—he hurried his thoughts along at this point—and had led to martial law being introduced to the U.K. He had survived. Here he was, weak as a newborn foal, but free of sniffles and coughs and fever. And if he had survived, then maybe it wasn’t as bad as he had imagined. . . .
He shivered, but that was because the house was cold. He picked up the duvet and threw it around his shoulders. Feeling a little stronger already after just one slice of tinned meat, he walked over to the boiler and flicked the central heating switch on. A pause, a loud click and the heating whirred into motion. He smiled.
Pausing to collect the plate of corned beef, Tom walked through to the living room and turned on the television and a couple of lamps. He crammed a whole slice of meat into his mouth and settled back on the settee with the remote control.
The TV was tuned to the sports channels, as usual, but only flickering, snowy static showed on the screen. That didn’t surprise him too much—the sports channels would, he supposed, be the last things to be reinstated after a world crisis. The BBC, that’s what he needed to watch. If anyone could tell him how far the recovery was underway, he could rely on the good old Beeb.
The channel changed to BBC1 and Tom stopped chewing as his lower jaw dropped. The screen showed a dark red background over which was printed a few sentences; an expressionless voice spoke the same sentences over and over in an unending loop:
This is an emergency announcement. The Acting Prime
Minister, General David Banning, has issued a nationwide order that any infected person found in a public place be shot on sight. He urges anybody currently unaffected by the Millennium Bug to remain where they are and not to attempt to have contact of any sort with any other person. May God be with you. . . .
This is an emergency announcement. The Acting Prime Min—
The television screen and the lamps went off simultaneously. The whirring and clicking of the boiler that Tom could usually hear in the lounge when the TV was off had also stopped.
Tom sat in the gloom, listening to the rain lash against the windows, and forced himself to finish the corned beef, though his appetite seemed to have disappeared with the electricity.
* * * * *
By the time she reached the outskirts of New York City, Diane Heidler had become an old hand at syphoning gasoline from abandoned vehicles. She could start the flow with one suck and knew exactly when to whip the tube out of her mouth and clamp the ball of her thumb over the end so as to minimise loss through spitting or spilling. She had even grown accustomed to the foul, fiery taste. In fact, she sometimes welcomed it for it banished the stench of the putrefying occupants of the vehicles. She had quickly learned that syphoning only seemed to work on older-model vehicles. It wasn’t a problem—she was spoilt for choice.
She approached the city via New Jersey. She had not seen a living person for three days and he had been almost dead, slumping towards her when she opened the car door and half-falling to the road with a weak groan. She’d had to step over him to check his gas gauge and release his fuel cap. When she had finished syphoning his fuel, she poked him with the toe of her right foot. He groaned again, but did not open his eyes. The other occupant of the car—an old woman; his mother?—had been dead for a day or so judging from the smell and the way her body was swelling.
The number of stalled vehicles began to rise as she drew nearer to the city and the fear of finding her way blocked began to grow. If she came across an obstacle that she could not find a way past, she would have to walk, a prospect that held no attraction. Diane had a slight frame that would cope with a long hike, but she would much prefer to avoid it. Physical exercise was not an endeavour that she particularly liked to pursue. And it had been raining steadily for most of the morning.
Her luck held at first. The toll road and bridge to Staten Island, though blocked in the other direction, was clear heading to the island. She had to slalom around a couple of cars, but made it onto the island without mishap. Her luck ran out trying to get from Staten.
She had almost made it to Brooklyn, when she found the road blocked by a snarl of silent vehicles. She stopped the car and thumped the steering wheel in frustration.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” she muttered. “Oh, well. Only one thing for it. . . .”
Diane got out of the car and leaned back inside to retrieve her knapsack from the passenger seat. Buttoning her jacket tightly and muffling her neck with her scarf, she opened the rear door and grabbed a couple of bottles of water and a few snacks that she thrust into the knapsack. She considered the length of plastic tubing for only a moment, before closing the door on it. She didn’t even notice the empty canister on the floor. With a brief glance of regret at the car—she would have to get one in just that colour when all this was over—she turned her face into the drizzle and began to walk.
The stalled traffic formed two solid lines, but there was ample space for a lone pedestrian. Once or twice, Diane had to pick her way around or over rotting bodies. If she had given it any thought, she might have guessed that these people, too, had decided to walk, but had died where they fell when illness overcame them. But she didn’t speculate; the bodies were simply more obstacles, smelly, oozing obstacles, in her way.
She passed a motorcycle, its former rider gone, keys still in the ignition. She stopped and considered for a moment, but only a moment as she had absolutely no idea how to ride one. She shrugged, making water drip down her neck, and continued on.
Her jacket, designed more to keep out cold than rain, had become heavy and the clothes beneath damp as she stepped onto Brooklyn. The cause of the traffic jam became evident a mile or so on when she came to the exit ramp. A container truck had jack-knifed, blocking both carriageways as effectively as a cork in a bottle. Boxes of whatever it had contained had spilled out and lay sagging and bloated in the rain. She gave them no more than a cursory glance. Whatever was in the boxes held no interest for her.
Having left the expressway, Diane did not have to walk much further. She came across a yellow taxi standing at an angle with its front tyres against the kerb as though it had trundled to a halt. A man’s body lay face down on the grass verge a few yards away. She glanced inside. No corpses. No keys.
She tried the driver’s door and it swung open. The interior light came on, looking strong, indicating the car’s battery was still good.
Diane walked over to the body. Breathing through her mouth, she grasped the body by the shoulders and half-turned it so she could reach into the pockets of the bomber jacket that the man wore. Although the jacket was thick, Diane fancied that the shoulders beneath felt a little squelchy and she grimaced.
The first pocket was empty. Turning the body the other way, she reached into the other pocket of the jacket. Her hand encountered something sticky and she withdrew it sharply. A quick glance and sniff at her fingers revealed that the sticky thing must be a roll of sweets. Nearly ready to give up and resume trudging, she thrust her hand inside the pocket again, deeper, past the sweets, and came out holding a bunch of keys.
She stood, ran back to the taxi and lowered herself into the driver’s seat. She inserted the key into the ignition—it went in smoothly—and turned it. The engine coughed, spluttered, then roared into life.
Diane shrugged out of her wet jacket and flung it in the back. She drove the rest of the way to JFK without incident.
Chapter Twelve
The flatbed truck moved northwards past Central Park, then turned east through Harlem, without difficulty. The roads remained virtually deserted until they reached FDR Drive, but even here they encountered stalled vehicles only in patches and were easily able to manoeuvre around them.
Milandra entrusted the driving to Grant’s calm assurance. She sat on the bench seat in the cabin next to him, with Simone on her right next to the passenger door. In the back, wearing waterproof jackets beneath which they kept the readied Uzis out of the rain, rode Wallace and Lavinia. They shared the flatbed with five motorcycles, a tarpaulin secured to protect them from the worst of the elements.
For a few moments as they searched for a way past knots of entangled vehicles onto the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, Milandra thought they would have to abandon the truck and take to the motorbikes. It wasn’t a thought that filled her with delight. Although her Harley had been custom-made to comfortably support her bulk and she could ride like a veteran Hell’s Angel, she didn’t derive the thrill from riding a motorcycle that the others, particularly Wallace and Simone, seemed to. It made her feel vulnerable. Mortal. Not something she liked to be reminded of.
“It’s okay,” Grant said. “I think I can see a way past.”
Inching forward and using the front end of the truck as a sedentary bulldozer, Grant nudged the obstructing vehicle out of the way and their route onto the bridge was clear.
They drove east, crossing the East River onto Randalls Island, and then turned south, joining the road from the Bronx. The route remained clear, the occasional stalled car failing to hamper their progress.
It was only as they approached the East River again, to cross into Queens, that they began to come across more and more abandoned vehicles, forcing Grant to slow down and weave a path through them like an obstacle course.
Slower and slower he went, not much more than walking pace, but still he was able to find a way through.
“I don’t like this,” Grant muttered. “It’s almost as though these cars have been set out like this deliberately . . .
arranged, to slow down any approaching vehicles.”
There’s something not right here he sent. Be alert!
Grant lifted his right hand from the steering wheel and banged once on the roof of the cabin. Immediately, an answering thud sounded from above.
Milandra added a note of caution. Only use the weapons as a last resort she sent. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves
Another thud sounded on the roof and Milandra smiled.
“Why?” said Simone.
“Huh?” said Milandra.
“Why not draw attention to ourselves? I thought most everyone else was dead.”
“Yes, Simone, most are. But there will be survivors. Some of them may have already found each other. Started banding into groups. They’ll be scared and angry. The last thing we need is to draw survivors to us at this juncture.”
Grant grunted in agreement, not taking his eyes from the road. He looked tense and Milandra realised that she felt the same. She glanced at Simone. By contrast, the girl seemed relaxed, one jeans-clad knee drawn up in front of her, foot resting on the benchseat, hands clasped around her knee. She looked out of the windscreen, then out of the side window, as though close to boredom.
She sensed Grant stiffen. “Here we go,” he muttered.
Ahead through the drizzle, Milandra could see the outside lane blocked by a car that had stopped, or been moved, so that it was tight to the concrete central barrier. Inside the car, a maintenance truck with cones and warning signs in the back was pulled alongside, blocking the next lane. They were just passing under one of the grey suspension girders and the carriageway was four lanes wide. An RV, a white one that looked shiny and new, had been parked sideways across the remaining two lanes, providing a complete barrier.
Grant pulled the flatbed to a halt five yards or so from the RV and engaged the park brake. He left the engine running and the windscreen wipers on.
“What now?” said Simone. She had both feet on the floor and sat forward, peering through the drizzle. Milandra sensed excitement flowing off her.
