The Plague Series (Book 2): The Last Outpost

by Hawkins, Rich

  The back door was ajar, and drifts of brown leaves had formed just beyond the threshold. The windows were intact. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. A pool table to his right, cues scattered around it on the floor. A nub of blue chalk on a stool. The table was clear except for the white ball, which he picked up and turned in his hand. He’d been a member of his local pub’s team less than a year ago. A bittersweet memory. Good company, a few drinks, and lots of laughter. Usually a hangover the next morning. He’d been pretty good, too, once beating a man who played semi-pro.

  Less than a year ago, the possibility of his current situation would have been laughable, something snatched from a horror film. He ran his hand over the green felt surface and it was like a tactual glimpse into a past he would have given anything to return to. He missed his old mates.

  Royce placed the white ball back on the table then walked down the corridor past the toilets. A woman’s purse on the floor. To his left was a doorway and when he stepped through it he was standing in the restaurant and he was relieved that nothing wet and twitching slumped at any of the tables. Places had been set. Napkins folded around cutlery. Set on the middle of each table was a small thin vase holding a dead flower.

  In the bar, when he stood among the toppled stools, the familiar bittersweet smell of stale lager made him dizzy. Beer mats and smashed glasses. Coins on the floor. At one end of the room was a small area with a sofa, a fireplace and a standing bookshelf. This would have been his kind of drinking hole, back when monsters didn’t exist.

  The front door was bolted shut. Windows looked out at the silent street. His attention was drawn to the painting over the fireplace: hounds and riders chasing a fox across knuckled hills. Horseshoes pinned above the bar. Old tankards resting on shelves in small alcoves and inscribed with the names of long-dead men and local football heroes. Framed photos from almost one hundred years ago of farmhands resting from their work with jugs of cider. A black and white photo of a Highland terrier with ‘RIP Walter 1978-1990’ scrawled underneath. Fantasy Football results pinned on an upright wooden beam. Dusty wheat sheaves and ancient blunt hand-scythes decorated the murky corners, and a widescreen television hung on the wall near the dead jukebox.

  He stepped behind the bar. The bottles hanging on the optic brackets were empty, as were most of the bottles on the back bar. Drained bottles of vodka, whiskey, rum and port. Some had been smashed into glittering fragments. He breathed in the ghost-fumes of hard spirits. A full bottle of Cinzano. Sherry. Bottles of wine, orange juice, beer, lager, and Coke in the small fridges. Budweiser, Carlsberg, and Peroni. He licked his dry lips. All room temperature, but drinkable. He felt a little giddy, and his stomach filled with fluttering wings.

  He tried the hand pumps but they were empty.

  Stuck to the top edge of the mirror at the back of the bar were photos of patrons and regulars. Red-faced men raising their pints. Silent laughter from open mouths. A photo of a ginger cat sitting on the bar and cleaning its paws.

  Underneath the bar were opened boxes of crisps, pork scratchings, and roasted peanuts. There had to be over fifty bags in total. His mouth watered and it was hard to resist opening a packet straight away, but then a scraping noise from the kitchen startled him from his daydream.

  Knife in hand he stepped among the stainless steel worktops over the cold tiled floor. A deep metal sink filled with broken crockery. Dust everywhere. An old bloodstain on a wall. Scattered metal utensils. Dry pasta had spilled from a split-open bag and formed a small mound on the floor. Rat droppings around the legs of the worktops and the scratching of the rodents from unseen holes. The smell of old food and rot permeated the air. The kitchen was windowless, with the only light seeping into the room from the doorway to the bar. Royce pushed away the feeling that he was walking into a tomb he’d never emerge from. He switched on his torch and swept it around, pausing at the entrance to another room to the side. The scraping sound was coming from further into the kitchen, where the shadows were taller and dense like fluid. The scraping sound was coming from an opened walk-in fridge at the back of the room. He slowed, careful not to slip on dried puddles of tomato ketchup and mustard, and with his legs heavy and slow he stepped forward and aimed the torchlight at the dark creeping out of the open doorway.

  Royce halted, and a low breath escaped from his mouth.

  The smell was awful and choking. Shrivelled, festering fruit and vegetables on the floor. Spoiled meat and dairy. A tainted ripeness.

  A figure was standing by the back wall of the fridge, its back to Royce, flanked by shelves of rotting food. He raised the torchlight until it settled on the hunched, shivering form of an old man.

  “Christ,” Royce whispered, afraid that if he had to turn and run, his legs would fail him.

  The man wore only a pair of blue-and-white striped pyjama bottoms that reached just short of his ankles above his bare feet. Lank strands of grey hair hanging from the edges of his scalp. His naked back was covered with red pustules and squirming cilia, and his right arm, which ended at the point of a black, dripping claw, was withered and knotted. Mutated. The scraping sound was the black claw raking at the back wall, gouging at plaster and brick. The man turned around, and his face was a gaping cleft of scarlet veins, wet apertures and teeth squirming through membranes. A bloated stomach glistening in the light. The man exhaled through his ruined face and a wiry proboscis emerged from the ragged damp hole. Its tip opened to taste Royce’s scent. The man’s bloodshot eyes, so raw and bloodshot, regarded Royce with something like excitement. His shoulders shuddered. His mouth widened and more appendages emerged until his lower jaw was swarming with a breathing nest of writhing feelers.

  Royce recognised what was left of the man’s face from one of the photos at the bar, and he stepped back, the torchlight shaking in his hand. He tightened his grip around the knife and opened his mouth, but his tongue didn’t move and his lips were as dry as sandpaper. No words.

  The old man breathed in the air between them, taking in the smell of Royce’s skin. After every inhalation, the man quivered and gasped.

  Royce raised the knife.

  The old man screamed towards him, all damp and shambling, bare feet slapping on the hard floor. Squirming sounds fell from the wound in his face. His arms thrashed.

  Royce put his weight behind the door and slammed it shut; the man fell upon it shuddering and wheezing. Royce bolted the door and only stopped retreating when he backed into a worktop and knocked over a plastic jar of cutlery. The old man, visible through the small glass pane high in the door, was pawing and scraping on the metal, his eyes still set upon Royce, the things in his face pattering and slithering, leaving greasy smudges on the glass.

  Royce pushed a heavy table against the door and walked away. He didn’t look back.

  *

  He went back through the main bar and through a side door to a flight of stairs leading to the first floor. The upstairs rooms were deserted: a living room, a small kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom with walls speckled with black mould. From a photo he found on the Welsh dresser he realised that the man in the kitchen had been the pub landlord. No sign of the man’s wife, but there were two packed suitcases on the bed in the larger bedroom, and a handbag on the floor. On the dressing table mirror someone had written I’m sorry in red lipstick.

  He found a double-barrelled shotgun and an army-issue metal ammunition box of twelve-bore cartridges concealed behind some musty jackets and coats at the back of the bedroom wardrobe. He pulled the shotgun from its zippered holdall and held it to his shoulder. The gun was heavy, cold and intimidating, and he swallowed as he looked down the barrel. Royce had never shot a gun in his life, except for when he was a boy and he spent a few errant afternoons with his best mate Pete Skipp shooting at tin cans with a 2.2 air rifle.

  He placed the shotgun back in the holdall and hung it over his shoulder.

  It was a relief to find no bodies. But when he checked the hamster cage upon a small ta
ble in one corner of the living room, there was a tiny husk of bones and white-orange fur hidden in a mound of hay. Royce’s heart sank at the sight. The water bottle secured to the metal wire and the small bowl set upon the bottom of the cage were both empty. He imagined the poor little creature’s last days, starving and dying of thirst. Had its tiny mind processed its fate?

  Would he process it, when the time came?

  Royce took a linen sheet from the back of the sofa and draped it over the cage.

  *

  There was no food in the flat, so he went downstairs and secured all the entrances to the pub, hauled bar furniture against the doors and closed the curtains. He taped the edges of the curtains to the walls so no light would be visible outside when he lit a candle. He did a circuit of the ground floor and checked everything twice. In the men’s toilets the cigarette machine had been ripped from the wall, and he stepped around scattered coins on the floor. When he put his hand inside the metal and plastic wreck and fumbled around he pulled out a lone crumpled packet of Benson and Hedges left behind by whoever had looted the machine.

  He passed the next few hours sat at the bar with a beer and a whiskey chaser, staring at the hollow face in the mirror looking back at him.

  The shotgun was a temptation.

  *

  Night followed the fading of the light. No stars, no moon. Dark beyond darkness in the streets. The village was dead, and Royce wondered if anything still moved inside the abandoned houses. Flittering shadows fell and rose on the walls from the lone candle set upon a porcelain saucer on the bar. He took a bottle of whiskey, the candle, and the shotgun into the kitchen, and he set them down, save for the whiskey, which he swigged from as he sat on a cold worktop facing the barricaded fridge door. The whiskey spread warmth into his stomach and made the edges of his vision watery. His arms felt like cotton wool.

  He looked at the glass pane set into the door, and he grinned when the infected man appeared. Blood and another paler fluid were smeared across the glass, and the man’s awful face was little more than a suggested shape. The man turned his head and a lone bloodshot eye regarded Royce. Slow, weak scratching against the other side of the door. Royce nodded at him and raised the bottle in a silent toast, then drank deeply until his throat burned and he was gasping. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and looked at the man. The monster behind the door. He could hear the man’s breathing and the wet flopping of limbs.

  “Your name was Stanley Evans,” Royce said, his words slurred and slow. “Your wife was called Francine. I had a look at your last electricity bill. Hope you don’t mind.” He took another hit of the whiskey. The fumes were a comfort and reminded him of old friends. “But look at you now, Stanley. Were you in the first wave of infected? The ones who fell down? Were you infected by a bite or a scratch?”

  Stanley Evans didn’t answer. There was only that eye, impassive and dark. He snorted through the hole in his face.

  “What’s it like to be infected? What’s it like to be one of them? Is there some great revelation after infection? Do you discover the secrets of the universe? Do you remember who you were? Do you remember your old life? What do you see when you see me?”

  No answer from beyond the door. Royce grunted and shook his head. His eyes stung and felt heavy, grinding in their sockets like marbles in metal.

  “What are you?” He was talking to the plague now. The virus. The pestilence. “Where are you from? Did those titans in the sky bring you here and unleash you upon us? What’re your long-term objectives? What’s your endgame? What do you have planned for us?”

  Just the low sound of rasping breaths scraping through black lungs. Stanley’s eye never left Royce, and Royce felt himself scrutinized by something more immense than the host body trapped behind the steel door.

  “Are you a hive mind?” Royce said. He drank again and whiskey trickled down his chin. He was close to tears. “Do you realise how much you’ve destroyed? You took everything. My family. My life. So many lives. Do you know what you’ve done?”

  Again, no answer.

  “Fuck you, then.”

  Royce threw the bottle and it shattered against the door. He grabbed the shotgun, which he had loaded earlier, and stood and stared at the door for a long time. His face was hot, clammy and damp. His heart a cacophony under his ribs.

  The thing that used to be Stanley Evans retreated silently into the dark beyond the door.

  *

  The night and the following day were splintered memories.

  A bottle always at his mouth. Shifted the barricade from the front door and pulled back the bolt. Turned the key in the lock. His hand shook around the doorknob. The sounds of the infected outside. A pack passing through the village. He wiped tears from his face and dared himself to open the door and step outside. To walk into the infected’s waiting arms.

  Smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke through the broken barrel of the shotgun, like he’d seen the actor Jason Flemyng do in a film once. He giggled, and it was the closest to hysteria he had been since the days after his family died.

  Slumped on the bar with empty crisp packets scattered around him. Ashtray full of cigarette ends. Staring at his hands until his eyes stung from not blinking.

  Playing darts. Swaying as he stood at the oche. Examining the sharp tip of a dart, tempted to push it into his eye.

  He vomited undigested food and alcohol into a bucket once used for donations to the local scout troop. Taste of bile and whiskey in his mouth, coating his teeth. Wiping his wet face and gasping on his hands and knees over the puddle of his own gruel-thin vomit.

  Huddled on the sofa with his arms around his chest and his eyes squeezed shut. Saliva on his chin and lips. Rocking back and forth in an attempt to keep down the remaining contents of his stomach. A bottle of vodka had been tipped over, spilling across the floor.

  He smashed a glass and picked up a small shard and ran it over his forearm just deep enough to mark the skin.

  Kneeling on the floor with the shotgun barrel in his mouth, sobbing over the dead. Surrounded by empty bottles and glasses. Just one twitch of his finger on the trigger would be enough. The taste of metal and gun oil. A murmur in his throat, strangled and plaintive. A voice in his head goading him to spray the top of his head against the ceiling.

  He closed his eyes and imagined endless fields of green and trees below a never-fading sun and a summer sky. Somewhere far away from the stinking rooms and hovels of his existence. No point in surviving if there was nothing to survive for, and this brought him the sort of acceptance that desperate, hopeless people feel before they throw themselves from bridges or high-rise windows.

  He smiled around the shotgun barrel.

  *

  His finger paused on the trigger, an inch from ending it all. He opened his eyes and slowly withdrew the shotgun barrel from his mouth, and it clinked against his front teeth. He took his finger from the trigger and exhaled through a mouth that felt swollen and numb. His face was sore as though he’d been pawing at the skin under his eyes with his long, dirty nails.

  He put the shotgun down and stared at his hands.

  *

  Royce dreamed of fun fairs and village fetes, seaside arcades and FA Cup Finals; doing the weekly shopping and feeding ducks at the park; a night in with a DVD and a bottle of wine.

  He dreamed of being hunted by monsters, the last man in a tragic world.

  *

  The sound of an engine being turned over and failing to start woke him from the beer-stained table. The rattling grind of an ignition. Royce climbed to his feet, swaying and bleary-eyed, and went to a window and pulled back the duct tape that was sealing the curtains against the wall. He looked outside at the street coated in ashen shades of dusk.

  CHAPTER TEN

  By the time Royce stumbled into the street with the shotgun in his hands, the infected were emerging onto the street and one of them was already at the car, trying to open the locked driver’s door to reach the old man behin
d the steering wheel. They came from between the houses and emerged from gardens of damp vegetation and dense grass, walking or crawling, sniffing at the air. Skulking in the shadows. Snorts and pitiful cries. Idiotic faces opening wide.

  Royce called to the infected man by the car, and the man turned to face him, shoulders crooked and heaving, gibbering through a lipless mouth peeled back from his jagged teeth. He came at Royce in a quick walk with his hands flinching at his sides. Royce froze, planted his feet and raised the shotgun. Heart pounding in his ears, his hands slick as he fumbled with the stock against his shoulder.

  The infected man shrieked, mouth full of black rot, and reached for him.

  The shotgun roared before Royce realised he’d even pulled the trigger; the recoil pushed him backwards, his ears ringing. And when he looked down the barrel he saw the man flailing on the ground with one arm wrenched from its socket and hanging by a rope of gristly sinew. His right ear was a dripping flap of perforated skin and cartilage. His shoulder was mangled and bleeding.

  Royce stepped back and turned to his left just as a teenage girl in torn leggings and a blood-stained t-shirt ran at him from that direction. Her face was a ruin of teeth, raw flesh and red spines. She was within five yards of Royce when he went to raise the shotgun and it bucked in his hands and obliterated her right knee. She collapsed and screamed, clawing at the air with wet hands.

  Royce rushed to the car. The man looked up at him with moon-eyes, then turned away and resumed his attempts to start the engine.

  “Open the door,” Royce said. “Come with me. I can help you.”

  The old man ignored him and tried again to start the engine. Down the street, partly-shrouded by the growing mist, the infected were massing, drawn by the gunshots and the man’s attempts to start the car. They had seen Royce.