by Glen Johnson
There was a Mitsubishi Shogun which had flattened a small picket fence and rammed straight into the front of a thatched cottage. A fire had started, either from the 4X4’s petrol tank or from somewhere within the building. Half of the small dwelling and the two next to it had been partly consumed by the flames. Parts of the smouldering thatch roof was still strewn everywhere.
I slowly drove the car along the main street. Bodies littering the pavement and on the road and in gardens like thrown confetti. A flock of house sparrows, along with a few blackbirds, lay scattered across several gardens and the road.
I navigated around a paperboy, his papers littering the street, blown around by the wind and made mushy by the rain. The boy’s small body lay twisted over the frame of his white BMX bike, the back wheel lazily turning in the air, the small reflectors spinning around, being the only movement.
My head was also spinning. How could no one have noticed? Where was the police, the ambulances? Why was it so quiet and still? When had this happened?
I was no taphonomy specialist, but I had done some research for my last book. Taphonomy comes from the Greek word taphos, meaning tomb. There are five stages used to describe the process of decomposition: Fresh, Bloat, Active and Advanced Decay, and Dry/Remains. These five stages are coupled with two stages of chemical decomposition: Autolysis and Putrefaction.
The human bodies I had seen at the farmhouse had been well on the way to Stage three: Active and Advanced. Strange that the animals in the barn and scattered around the area were stage two: Bloated. Maybe when they had run out of humans in the area, they had started on the animals, hence their different decaying stage.
But those in the village were different again; they would be classed as Fresh.
I parked in the middle of the street and walked into a small shop with an attached post office. I needed food, even with everything I had seen. My blood sugar level was right down, a headache starting to gather just behind my temporal lobes, and rather than eating properly I had been throwing up. And unlike everyone else, I was still every much alive and I needed food and drink to keep me that way.
People were blocking the narrow aisles. The cashier was slumped over the counter. They all had a glassy look in their dead eyes. Tongues lulling out their months, the same as the cows I had seen. None of them looked as if they had died in painful convulsions. It looked like they just all slumped over, dead. And just like the abattoir it stunk of waste, this time human.
I grabbed what I needed, not having to worry about leaving money behind.
I tried the old fashioned red box public payphone that sat on the curb outside the store. Nothing. Dead as the bodies littered around it.
Along the main street cars had crashed into stationary ones and each other. All the engines silent. Did they turn off when they collided, or did the engines still turnover and simply run out of petrol or diesel?
I ran to a small house that was squashed between two others in a long dark red brick row. I kicked the door open, splintering it from the frame. I stood in the front room, my heart racing.
The décor was straight out of the fifties; the wallpaper and old furniture all so depressing in muted brown and faded green colours, with three ducks hanging on the wall over the fireplace, similar to Hilda Ogden’s three plaster flying ducks from Coronation Street, I had seen on retro posters.
Slumped in the stripy brown and yellow chair was an old man, his feet up on a matching footstool, with one sock off, as if he had started to cut his toenails. But now he looked like he was taking a short nap, rather than being dead. Beside him, face down on the brown carpet was his wife. A brightly polished silver tray with two cups and a teapot, sugar bowl and teaspoon lay smashed and scattered around her.
In front of the old man, resting on an old chipped and scuffed cabinet was a fifty inch flat screen LG plasma television, which completely looked out of place in the old well worn room. It was on, but it showed only static. Wait, the aerial could be disconnected. It wasn’t. I flicked through the channels. All as dead as its owners.
Panic was making me sway on my feet.
Next to the old man, on a small side table, was a handheld radio that looked as old as its owner. I grabbed it, flicking it on then skipping through the different stations. All I received in reply was the hissing of static. No stations were broadcasting.
I grabbed my iPhone out of my pocket and turned it on with a shacking hand. It seemed to take forever to boot up. The silver Apple logo appeared, inert and mute. Eventually the screen switched to my lock screen wallpaper, but the bar across the top was announcing it was searching for the carrier. After a minute of holding the device in my shacking hand, no Wi-Fi, no 3G and no 02 carrier registered.
It was a dead zone.
29
Words from the Wise
The phone in the old couple’s home also didn’t work. I didn’t understand what was happening. Had the entities wiped out the whole village, including the factory? And why wasn’t anything broadcasting? Were they blocking all telecommunication signals with their technology – phone lines, digital TV, mobiles and broadband – so a warning couldn’t be sent out?
Surely the whole country wasn’t now one huge mausoleum? Had the harvest, as they called it, already begun in earnest? What name would mankind give to this nameless terror?
I returned to the white Fiesta, revving the engine as I tried to work out what to do, where to go. I continued on down the main street, just to see where the road came out, possibly to a main road and signposts, so I could get my bearings.
All the way along the street it was just the same, death everywhere. I was preoccupied with my daunting thoughts that I didn’t notice any signpost, only the street names, which were more-or-less the same in every village and town throughout the country – Mount Pleasant Road, Abby Road, Courtney Road, King Street, Queen Street and Union Street.
I had to navigate around crashed cars. In one section of the road a large white Ford van was blocking the whole street, having jack-knifed sideways. I had to backup and find another route. I found a small back road, just wide enough to fit the car though. It came out into a large paved pedestrian precinct, full of market stalls, either in the process of setting up or packing away, I couldn’t tell which. Luckily there weren’t too many bodies, and the stalls were spaced far enough apart to navigate through them, and then back onto the road and out the other side of the small parish.
There was no main road on the other side of the village, just another narrow lane winding its way through the high hedges on either side. I continued along it, my mind drifting, confused and angered at the same time. So much death. So many lives ended so tragically. And what were they talking about when they made reference to the Spanish Influenza, were they trying to imply they were responsible for all those millions of deaths? First taking about seventy-five million, then almost a hundred million. How many would they take of today’s almost seven billion population?
I came across a hamlet, if it could be called that, simply a collection of eight houses along the lane I was travelling. At first I though this was different, no bodies littering the lane. Until I saw an arm hanging from a smashed windowpane. Then noticing a dead cat against a low wall. Another lifeless zone.
Questions ran through my mind. Why didn’t they just kill me? Why was I so special? Running the events of the farmhouse over and over in my head, I realized they could have easily stopped me at any given moment. So why hadn’t they? So many questions, that I simply didn’t have the answers to.
Then a movement caught my attention, a flash of something. I slowed the car, bringing it almost to a stop, crawling it along. There in the field to the right was something I couldn’t explain. A watery image was gliding across the green field, the grass unaffected by its passing. It seemed the size and shape of a person, but I couldn’t see clearly, it looked like a misty apparition.
My eyes were straining while trying to work out what the image was. When suddenly more appeared
from out of my line of sight and continued across the field such as the first. No appendages moving, simply gliding. A gathering of possibly ten or so figures was floating before me, each the same height as the others, each seemingly gliding without effort off into the distance.
They could either see me and ignored me, or simply didn’t register my presence so close to them. The blurs disappeared into a tightly packed tree line, a dense wood of dark pines that backed on to the field. I could no longer see them.
I drove faster, passing fields and hedges that were now simply a green and brown blur. Rounding one corner I startled a covey of grouse that took to flight from behind one hedgerow and flew across the road in front of the car.
They startled me; I braked hard, watching the birds fly down the narrow lane.
So there was life around.
Then out of nowhere the ghostly spectres appeared from the woods to the right that the road dissected through. The figures floated straight across the path of the startled birds. The dark figures were larger than I first thought, possibly ten feet tall. Broad shoulders tapering down to a narrow waist and legs. It seemed to be grey-black in colour, and the head blended in with the shoulders. The only feature on the face that was recognizable was two large round bright red eyes, like car reflectors. There were no arms, but what looked like tucked up wings folded against its sides and back.
Suddenly all the birds that passed close to the figures started falling to the roads surface. The red-eyed creatures continued undaunted, disappearing back into the woods to the left of the narrow lane.
The road was now littered with dead birds.
I sat motionless, trying to comprehend what had just happened. I could see the motionless birds on the road where they had dropped.
I climbed from the car, walking slowly towards them, always keeping an eye on the woods to the left. But nothing appeared from that direction.
I stood over one bird, kicking it with my trainer. It didn’t move. It was dead, as I knew it would be. It had no marks on it, no blood dribbling from its beak. It was just dead, as if its soul had been ripped out and it was now just an empty meat sack.
Had these creatures been the cause of all the death I had seen? Were the entities controlling them? Where were they now heading?
I stood for a few moments, pondering on what I could do. Should I follow the figures, see where they went? The woods were thick, no road headed in that direction. Did I really want to go following these things into the dark woods? Shit no, my common sense was screaming.
I continued on my way down the narrow lane. Not once meeting another living person. Until I came to a crossroad of two small lanes overlapping.
There was a dark green wooden road sign, but it was too old and weatherworn to be readable. A green bench was up on a small embankment besides the old useless signpost. Sat on the bench was a little old man. He was very much alive and staring down at me, as if he was expecting me.
“Trouble?” he asked in almost a whispered voice. I was shocked I could hear him, considering I was still sat behind the wheel of the car.
I slammed the door shut harder than I intended. And walked a few steps over to the mound he was raised on. I noticed a few steps worn into the mud embankment.
The old man’s eyes stayed fixed on me. He had a blade of grass resting between his wrinkled lips, one hand holding the grass as he chewed it. He looked old, very old. Years to old to number. Hair almost pure white, wispy and long, having a life of its own as it floated about his head, looking like a dandelion. No beard or moustache, looking like he didn’t even need to shave. He resembled black and white pictures of wise old Indians I had seen in numerous books. He wouldn’t look out of place with a big feather headdress on with an animal skinned tasselled coat astride a mottled mustang.
And I had seen him before – in a daydream. He was the figure that took the place of the monk in my dream, while sleeping in the car at Hay-Tor car park.
I made no move to climb the steps.
“Cold wind,” he muttered. His eyes still locked on me.
“Where are you from?” Was all I could think to ask, what with his strange appearance and being the only living person I had seen in the whole area. He had a strange air about him; I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“Here ‘n’ there, you could say.” His eyes closed slightly, but I had the feeling he was looking at me through the slits.
I wanted to ask a hundred questions. But couldn’t even being to know where to start.
“You need to clear your mind. Focus on what really matters,” he said.
It was a strange statement.
“You are not safe here. Things are happening, and there is –”
He cut me off mid sentence. “Everything happens for a reason,” he said while twisting the grass. He was full of strange statements. And it just happened to be one of my own sayings. I used it all the time.
“Look, we need to get out of here. Do you know where the closest town or village is?”
He continued chewing for a moment before answering, seemingly mulling the question over first. “There’s a village not more than two miles back the way you came from.”
I was about to cut him off, tell him there was nothing there now, everyone was dead. A ghost town. When his next words shocked me.
“But as you already know, only death resides there. They have already sent them out.”
I tried to comprehend the meaning of his words.
“That way,” he pointed the stalk of grass to the right, “leads to another dead village.” He pointed straight on. “That leads to safety. But for how long?” He let the words hang in the air. “Left leads back to the farmhouse and the answers you need.”
“How do you know what’s –”
He waved a hand to silence me. “Many things walk this world with mankind. Many things share the same universe. Many things coexist. Many things simply take.” He placed the grass back into his mouth. “The problem with man is he sees, but doesn’t believe. Hears, but doesn’t listen. Things that are in your grasp but slip by.
“You know more about the stars and the heavens than you do the forests of your own planet. More about the surface of Mars and your moon than you do the floor of your oceans.
“Always looking away, never near. Things exist that have been here since the dawn of time, things you refuse to see or acknowledge.”
I placed one foot on the steps.
“Return to the farmhouse. Finish this, before it’s too late.” He was pointing down the road to the left. I looked down it, the same direction the figures had vanished towards.
“What does –” but I swallowed my words. The old man was gone, he was nowhere in sight. In his place was a simple paperback book and what looked like an amber necklace.
30
The Book, Pendant and Omens
I knew even if I looked the old man would be nowhere is sight. I sat down on the same bench he had been resting on only moments before. What strange things he had mentioned. They have been sent out, he had said. They are starting the gathering. And, things coexisting.
I looked down at what lay on the green faded wooden bench. A simple dog-eared paperback book with a necklace resting on top. I couldn’t see the books name because the amber stone rested over most of the cover.
Gingerly I stretched out a hand and held it above the two items for a moment, not sure why I didn’t just pick them up. I pinched the leather thong of the necklace and lifted it slowly, the leather unrolled until it caught the pendant that rose up into the air, it gently swung back and forth at arms length.
It looked like a simple tacky piece of jewellery you could buy in most cheap shops. A dark brown leather thong with a large amber stone in the middle of a twisted metal surround. But lifting it closer I could see what rested inside the amber stone, a strange kind of computer chip, about the size of a thumbnail, it was easily picked out. It looked like a chip pulled from any number of computers. It seemed strange. Normall
y inside amber would be an insect or small flower seed, but a microchip?
Stranger still was the title of the book: The End of Days by Matthew K. Applegate. With the words: A Warning to an Unprepared World, written in small red letters across the top.
I had never heard of the book. UFO and hairy monster hunters were one to a dozen back in the early seventies, with the influxes of UFO sightings all across the world. A large group of these published at least one book. A small market. Most authors never released another, they just faded into the background.
Why would the strange old man leave this book behind?
