The trees all around him. He caught movement at his flanks. Mammals of the woods and birds in the trees. The cold found his skin. He licked moisture from gnarled oaks and birches.
Further on he encountered a white stag feeding from the sodden ground. Royce halted, open-mouthed, careful to keep his distance. In awe of the magnificent thing. The stag turned its head and looked at him. The temptation to reach out and try to touch the animal, to make sure it was real and not some fever-illusion.
“I’m surprised you’re still alive,” Royce whispered, his voice like nails over sandpaper. “I thought the infected would have caught you by now.”
The stag was not afraid of him.
Royce slouched against the nearest tree. “I guess you could say the same to me, mate.” He coughed hard and hunched over with spit on his lips, and when he raised his face again the white stag was gone and Royce was alone again.
“Good luck out there,” he said and walked onwards.
*
He reached the edge of the woods soon after, and emerged into a dank meadow where the grass smelled of brine and soaked his jeans up to his knees. Slowworms and adders hid from his clumsy footsteps. He stopped and looked beyond the meadow and the fields beyond it. In the distance, the dark shape of a village. Sloped roofs and squat chimneys. A slash of grey road. No sign of life.
A piercing cry on the low breeze startled him.
Royce walked further into the long grass, dragging his rucksack behind him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Under the sky of grey he stumbled onto the road and rested to cough up the thick phlegm from his throat. Crows circled overhead, waiting for him to fall. He entered the village from the south.
The doors had been ripped away from a Ford Focus skewed across the middle of the road, and its windscreen was smashed to pale shards. Another car had stopped not far behind. Royce grimaced at the small, ravaged skeleton curled up on the backseat. Little shoes. Leathery sinew. All dried up and broken.
A fire had consumed a row of terraced houses on one side of the road. He picked through the remains but there was nothing he could use. He stepped on a jawbone among the charred wood and ash. Lawns blackened, the grass scorched away. Flowerbeds nothing more than burnt patches of earth. A bird table leaning to one side, stained with soot.
Some doors were open, shadows beyond each threshold. The windows were dark. A motorbike had veered from the road, smashed through a wooden fence and into an ornamental rock pool. The rider was gone.
There were bones in the gardens. Scatterings of carrion. Everything silent and still, a photo into which he had intruded. He cast his eyes around then leaned on a low stone wall at the foot of a garden and coughed until his lungs burned and his chest ached with needling pain. Wiped his streaming eyes and tried not to imagine the infected unfurling themselves from their dens and hiding places and coming out into the street to embrace him. He sighed, closed his eyes against his swaying vision. There had to be a shop somewhere on the main road through the village. If not, he’d have to go house-to-house and hope to find something in those silent rooms full of fading memories and forgotten shades.
He rested behind the cover of a wrecked car and waited for the tightness in his chest to fade. His slumping heart, grey and tired. In the driver’s seat of the car, a body stripped to yellowed bone leered at the cracked windscreen covered in dust and dead leaves. Royce peered around the side of the car at the lifeless street ahead. Distant calls of the infected as they stalked the low hills. And the cry of a large bird somewhere out there, maybe a buzzard or a hawk. The rustle of litter drifting against kerbs or into gutters. Kicked by his feet. The smell of old death in the air, ingrained like a chemical taint. He supposed all the villages were like this now – cold, barren and tainted.
Royce moved down the street, boots scraping on the road. Crunch of grit underneath him. Every step taken slow and careful. He watched the windows above and around him.
Ahead, crows and magpies pecked at ripped rubbish bags, squabbling over rotting scraps and chicken bones. The magpies bullied the crows, outnumbering them. The crows flapped away as Royce approached, but the magpies didn’t move and regarded him with sullen, black eyes.
A car had crashed into a streetlight. A human femur wedged in a storm drain. He walked over envelopes littering the street. Ahead was a Royal Mail delivery van with its back doors open, and its contents of parcels and envelopes had spilled out onto the road, rain-sodden and thin, like stains in the tarmac; some of the envelopes flitted around the street, picked up by the wind and caught by bushes and the low branches of trees, scattered upon overgrown lawns.
Royce’s heart flinched as he saw movement far ahead on the straight, stretching road littered with abandoned cars. A glimpse of a piece of clothing. A flash of colour. His stomach turned to glass when he saw the swarm of infected emerge from around the corner. He stared at them for perhaps too long, then snapped out of his dull, dry-mouthed shock and climbed into the back of the Royal Mail van. He moved slowly, carefully, and pulled his rucksack alongside him among the mounds of envelopes and crumpled parcels. He winced at the noise the doors made as he pulled them shut, and was shocked by the complete darkness that swallowed him. He sat still, breathing hard, as the sounds of wet mouths, bestial grunts and slapping feet grew closer until they were louder than the frantic kicking of his heart. The van trembled around him. The sounds of a thousand beating drums. Screams and howls from hungry hearts. He buried his face in his hands and bowed his head as the swarm passed around the van. Knockings and scrapings on the sides of the vehicle. Wedding rings, bracelets, watches and jagged nails. Wet slopping of tendrils. Skittering of busy feet. Deafening, awful sounds. Something wheezed against the back of the van and Royce kept his head lowered and his eyes closed because he didn’t want to see the terrible face of the thing that would rip the doors open and pull him from his shelter.
He clasped his hands to his ears and whimpered lowly under his breath. His bladder slackened. He dared not loosen a cough from his throat. He thought of happier days and the sun of an English summer on his face. His mother’s voice calling him home for dinner. When he was a little boy, playing football with his father in the back garden. His wife in a hospital bed, screaming and crying and pushing as he held her hand and whispered that he loved her and she was the bravest woman he’d ever met. And then a new life wailing from new lungs. He cut the umbilical cord with shaking hands. His daughter handed to him, a grey little thing wrapped in blankets and topped with a little woollen hat. She looked up at him with the large curious eyes of a newborn. The wonder of the world she’d been born into. The love and the pain and all she would experience. The swell of Royce’s heart. His wife smiling at him, tears in her eyes, pale and exhausted.
And then they were taken from him when he opened his eyes. The swarm moved away. His shivering heart was all he could hear in the lonely dark. The silent aftermath of the infected’s passage. The creak of the van’s suspension in a sudden gust of howling wind.
He didn’t move for a long time, too scared to emerge from his hiding place among the old letters and parcels.
*
Royce sagged like a drunkard in the cold drizzle. The village shop had been ransacked, windows gutted to leave empty displays and pale shadows. Garden furniture outside the front of the shop was scattered and broken. Glass shards caught the light. He looked down by his feet at a human tooth among the glass; a molar with a bloody root. Instinctively, Royce pressed his tongue along his teeth. His gums ached.
He looked both ways down the street before he stepped into the shop, his knife like a useless toy in his brittle hand.
*
Rows of shelves and display units had been tipped over. Mould on the walls, below cobwebs in the high corners, all dry and wispy like the hair of corpses. The aisles were obstructed by broken things and smashed jars. There were animal droppings and torn newspapers on the floor. Plastic shopping baskets stacked in a corner. A fine coating of dust
covered each surface. The grey daylight couldn’t reach the back of the shop, so Royce swept the far walls with his torch and frowned at the unknown symbols and sigils painted in black upon them.
Looters had stripped the store. He guessed that other survivors had passed through the village, picking through the things left behind. There had been many refugees on the roads in the early days of the outbreak; those stranded on the mainland and left to die.
Aside from the man he’d seen killed a few days ago, he hadn’t encountered any non-infected people for weeks.
He picked through the wreckage and found a small bottle of water behind a toppled display stand, and a tin of mushroom soup under the freezer full of rotting joints of meat sloshing in water. He hated mushroom soup, but it was tempered by the discovery of a tin of hot dogs hidden in one corner beneath a collapsed rack of DVDs. He kissed the tin with his dry scabbed lips. Meat and protein. How bad things were that a tin of processed sausages in brine elicited a wave of emotion strong enough to weaken his legs.
He opened the water and downed half of the bottle before he remembered to stop so he wouldn’t get cramps in his stomach, which had shrunk from lack of food. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, gasping at the sheer relief of the water over his arid tongue and around his mouth, numbing the torture of his raw throat.
He picked through the DVDs, trying to remember which of the films he had watched and which films he’d never see. A rotating book rack as tall as Royce was still upright, and he spun it slowly to view the covers of pulpy westerns, bodice-ripping romances, and science fiction romps about explorers visiting alien worlds.
Despite his perseverance and thoroughness amidst the ruins, there was no medicine or alcohol to be found. When he had finished, and crouched on the floor in a corner hidden from view of the doorway, he gathered his meagre findings. The mushroom soup, bottle of water, hot dogs, and a packet of prawn cocktail crisps forgotten at the bottom of an emptied multipack.
Far off in the distance, the screams of monsters drifted over the devastated land.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As the rain fell through the empty windowpanes and pooled on the floor, Royce went into the back rooms to look for more supplies. The corridor he walked through was narrow and smelled of rotting cardboard, and when he found the stock room he was disappointed by bare shelves and discarded food wrapping. A dried human turd in a far corner. An old radio that didn’t work when he switched it on and turned the dial. He peered through the grease-clouded window out at the back of the property and saw a bony, shrivelled thing in a red jumper sprawled on the lawn.
He climbed the stairs in the dark, the torch in his hand the only light to peel shadows from the walls as he entered the flat above the shop. In the kitchen he pored through the cupboards. Drawers had been emptied onto the floor: useless household items, drawing pins and takeaway menus. Dark stains on the walls like healing bruises. The fridge was empty, and the plastic fruit in a bowl on the dining table looked good enough to eat. He considered, for a moment that took longer than it should have, scoffing the congealed animal fat collected in the dripping-tray under the George Foreman grill. He went through drawers until he found a box of paracetamol with the capsules still inside the blister packs, and he was so happy he would have cried if weren’t so exhausted.
Photos of a middle-aged couple on a wall in the living room. No bodies in the flat, for which he was grateful, and no signs of violence, not even a smashed glass or plate. There were no signs of infestation. A cosy little abode. He imagined the couple running the shop together and spending their nights in the flat. It was a nice thought, but it waned quickly, and then he was thinking about how they might have died.
The living room window looked down on the empty street, and the rain, driven by the wind, lashed against the glass and pattered like fingers. He locked the door to the flat and closed the curtains over the windows. He lit one candle and walked to the bedroom, where he chased two paracetamol capsules with some water. Then he undressed and left his stinking clothes in a pile by the bed and slid under the dusty sheets, croaking and wheezing like an old man. Shivering so much that his teeth chattered. Inside him, the scrape and ache of joints against sockets. His dry bones.
*
He woke from a nightmare about the plague manifesting into human form and wearing the faces of his family, and it made him reluctant to leave the bed and the blankets wrapped around him. His skin was hot and clammy, but he shivered from the cold in his leaden, aching limbs, and the blood was pulsing quickly behind his face. His breath smelled like sewage. No inclination to move, so he stared at the ceiling until the room stopped swaying. The flat was cold and he was unsure if the sun had risen yet.
It was a struggle to move, but when his bladder was close to bursting he got to his feet with a blanket over his shoulders and went to find a bucket or vase to piss in. He thought about staying at the flat for a while as he closed his eyes against the swell of his brain in his skull and tottered on weak legs; put one hand against the wall to steady himself.
He vomited a thin gruel into the pot sloshing with his urine, wiped his mouth, and couldn’t think of anywhere better to be in the last days of his dying species. Peering past the curtains at the ashen day and the dull sky he realised there was nothing out there for him, so he returned to the bed and lay under the blankets and sipped what water was left. He passed in and out of sleep, his temperature rising, and in a fever he thought he could hear his daughter gurgling in her cot while his wife played something mournful and slow on the piano they kept in one of the back rooms of their house.
Later, as he twisted and squirmed under the blankets and his eyes opened to the sound of his bones grinding in their sockets, he saw the television in the corner flicker into life. Noise and colour. He smiled woozily, his chin and lips damp with saliva, and caught glimpses of programmes from the time before the outbreak: Match of the Day, Only Fools and Horses, Downton Abbey, EastEnders, and an old episode of Top of the Pops in which Mick Jagger strutted across the stage blowing kisses like some broken, gangling marionette.
Then, finally, the BBC News on the first day of the outbreak. A pale newsreader in a crumpled suit. He looked scared and tired.
“There have been reports of disturbances in several cities across the country. Eyewitnesses state that members of the public are attacking other people in the streets. The Prime Minister is due to make an announcement in the next few minutes…”
Royce heard sirens and the panicked voice of his wife until the television died and left him in silence.
*
In his dreams they came to him all meek and mild and full of sadness, their skin like marble. Eyes like coal in their gaunt faces.
*
After two days in bed, he rose in the morning and stretched his sore, stiffened limbs. The crack of his bones under his skin, and the creak of muscle, tendons and gnarled sinew. His smell was ripe and pungent, steaming off the damp bits of him.
When he examined himself in the tall mirror his ribs were like thin shadows under his pale skin mottled with bruises and furrows. The sharp angles of bones suggested starvation. He was a gaunt, haunted creature, tired at being hunted. His beard was matted with dried spit, mucus and crumbs of food. The bottle by his bedside was empty, so he forced himself to scoop water from the toilet bowl and cup it into his mouth, and it was dripping from his chin as he drank and gagged. It tasted of chemicals. He barely kept it down, and it settled in the pit of his gut while he sat against the toilet groaning with his hands over his bloated stomach.
After he dressed he ate a jar of lemon curd baby food and thought about the days ahead. Suffering, fear, pain, desperation. A loneliness to stop his heart. Nothing for him in this blasted land of the plague. He found a plastic box of Lego behind the sofa – he guessed it might have been for grandchildren who had visited – and sat in the living room with blankets wrapped around him as he built colourful houses and blunt structures. When he finished and the box was empty,
he stared at his shaking hands for a long time.
The Lego houses broke into pieces when he threw them against the opposite wall. Scattered on the carpet. Why was he alive? Why was he trying to survive? Instinct? Something innate within himself? Of course, there were ways of escaping, but he lacked the constitution for suicide. To take his own life was something he daydreamed about, but the reality was beyond him.
He climbed to his feet with the blankets still around him and searched the flat again, in case he had missed a hidden bottle of alcohol somewhere, but the flat was dry. He craved a few pints. A few tinnies. Anything to numb his brain for a while.
Then he had an idea, and it was so simple he was dismayed it hadn’t occurred to him before.
CHAPTER NINE
Royce cupped his hands around his face and peered through the window at the front of the pub. Nothing moved inside. Motionless shadows, like patrons at the bar. Shades of old drinkers. The door was locked, and it wouldn’t give when he pushed against it with his shoulder. He went around the back of the property. The car park was empty except for an abandoned Vauxhall with its tyres shredded, and a mound of charred bodies where crows picked at blackened faces and fingers. Skin seared from bones. A large rat crossed his path and vanished into the shadows of an empty garage. The rats had fed well since the outbreak.
Through a beer garden of long grass and wooden tables with parasols leaning askew. The top half of a skull in a bare flowerbed. A smoking shelter where drinkers used to nip outside for a quick cigarette.
The Plague Series (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 4
