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?
He wondered what would happen to the ecosystem once the remaining survivors were killed or infected and there was only the infected left to claim the planet. He hadn’t even considered the titans in the sky.
The world was full of monsters now. Creatures like that thing birthed in the house. He imagined the great landmarks of the world surrounded by hordes of infected and it depressed him so much that he felt sick and aching with despair. He thought he could smell his wife’s perfume. Her scent. A great sense of loss washed over him and he blinked tears from his eyes.
The last thing he pictured in his mind before he fell asleep again was the Earth swarmed and covered by the plague and its progeny.
*
In the morning he descended from the attic and went out into the first light. There had been three bodies at the foot of the stairs and one crumpled, bloody cadaver halfway down, an infected man with the lower half of his face blasted away. Scattered teeth like forgotten marbles. The house had smelled of vinegar on the turn, and there were smears of stinking black fluid along the walls.
Outside, the remains of the boy Royce had killed were strewn about the lawn. Picked apart by scavengers during the night. A strip of red and orange on the horizon as the sun was rising above the curve of the Earth. The sky was clear, stars fading slowly. Dead stars, he thought, as he remembered his father telling him when he was younger.
The stars we see are already dead.
The thought of that interstellar distance so vast as to be incomprehensible. The notion had floored him then, and still inspired awe, even now.
He raised his head and stared at the vanishing constellations, those cosmic ghosts.
*
Ragged and nervous, Royce moved through the streets in the dawn. Nothing in the streets except wreckage and the bones of lost battles. He passed an infected woman hunched in the front seat of a Ford Escort. Her limp body hung out of the door, and when she saw him she dragged herself from the seat, but fell down, and Royce saw her right leg was bent the wrong way. She cried after him, her stomach bloated with something that made the skin ripple.
Royce didn’t look back.
*
The pub appeared down the road just as the sun breached the horizon. Silence in the open and the shadowed gaps between buildings. Sloped roofs against the sky.
His head ached. Hunger pains in the pit of his stomach.
A young girl was feeding from the corpse of an infected man Royce had killed last night. She was no more than eight years old. Her mouth was all over the man’s face, sucking skin and meat from the bone like a pig would dig for truffles with its snout, frenzied and awful. Human fat and grease were smeared around her mouth and chin. Her blonde hair was in pigtails but one of them had come undone into oily strands upon her shoulder, matted with dirt, soot and twigs. From her right shoulder to her left hip she wore a sash with BIRTHDAY GIRL! upon it. Glitter and cartoon stars. The skin of her face was sallow and loose as if it were a façade hiding her real face underneath. Idiot hunger in her eyes. The teeth in her little mouth were like shards of glass stained nicotine-yellow.
“You poor thing,” Royce whispered. “I didn’t know you ate your own dead.”
He slipped into the pub through the doorway still open from last night and saw that his belongings were untouched where he had left them. And the relief was enough to make him dizzy and euphoric. He bagged what supplies he could carry, mainly crisps and drinks, and quietened his thirst with a bottle of water guzzled in one go. He collected the remaining shotgun shells and stuffed them in his pockets, then grabbed the last bottle of vodka from the bar.
In the kitchen, the infected man stared through the glass at Royce. He considered opening the door and killing him, but it would be a waste of ammunition. Best to leave him alone and hope he would starve to death at some point.
“Goodbye, Stanley,” Royce said. “Be good.”
He returned to the bar area and gathered his belongings, and he did so in a slow, miserable stupor because he knew that beyond the village and out into the grey land there was only a kingdom of rust and ruin where he would probably die hungry, cold and terrified.
His little empire of dust.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Royce didn’t know why he was following the train track eastwards. There was no purpose. Maybe it was instinct of some sort. He would have spent some time pondering it, but it was irrelevant because he was very tired and all the philosophers were dead and gone.
He was hunched under the open sky, his breath white in the cold sunlight. Clouds made swift shadows upon the ground. Royce would occasionally study the sky, and when the cold air began to sting his eyes he lowered his face to the dull earth. He held the shotgun across his chest with the barrels pointed towards the ground. He was awkward and clumsy with the weapon; it didn’t come naturally to him. His arms and shoulders still hurt.
The track ran parallel to a dark swollen river for a few miles until the river veered away to the west, towards the sea far beyond the horizon. There had been bodies in the water, and on his side of the riverbank he’d found a fishing rod left behind on the stony dirt, and a fold-up canvas seat Royce considered taking before he left it toppled and snagged in clumps of long grass, all mildewed and damp.
A pack of feral dogs crossed the tracks fifty yards ahead. Royce kept the shotgun trained upon them until they disappeared into the fields.
His heart broke for all the lost pets.
*
He stopped at a small train station just outside the village of Longley, climbed onto a platform and stepped around the mouldering body of a woman clutching a handbag to her plundered stomach. A small waiting room merged the two platforms. Dead flowers in the shallow troughs under the shattered windows. It would have been a quaint, picturesque place if it weren’t for the signs of damage and violence.
He rifled through damp plastic bags piled upon a wooden bench, but found nothing of use. Royce examined a smashed Rolex he’d found by his feet. The hands had stopped at ten minutes past two. He tossed the watch onto the track. Then he opened the door to the waiting room and stepped inside.
The snack machine had been tipped over and ransacked a long time ago. Sheet metal ripped away from the frames. He crouched and reached inside it with his hand feeling for snacks and treats, but when he withdrew his hand there was only dust and a streak of grime on his fingers.
He broke into the ticket office, where a man in a blue blazer had slit his wrists in the corner by a filing cabinet, his head bowed to his chest. A skeletal thing with wisps of hair on a grey scalp. The knife, its blade crusted with dried blood, was still in the man’s hand. Royce found a small bag of Skittles behind the counter and then ate the sweets as he sat in a faux-leather seat, listening to the wind mourn along the empty tracks.
*
Royce crossed the track on the other side of the platform and climbed a grass embankment into a small car park. Makeshift shelters and ragged tents had been erected within a defensive square of parked cars.
Large scorch marks on the tarmac arou
nd the square. Soot stains and flecks of ash. Royce stood over the charred vestiges of dead infected and the sharp splinters of contorted bones.
They had used petrol bombs against the infected, but their last stand hadn’t lasted long, and all that remained of them was scattered bones and mangled bits. Rats fled from the remains. There was nothing to be salvaged amongst the mess. Royce checked the cars, too, but it was a waste of time and he leaned against a battered Vauxhall Nova and rubbed at his face. He imagined the refugees’ last hours holding off the infected until they were overwhelmed. Parents holding their children tightly. The last cries and screams and pleas for mercy. To see your family die and then follow them into death with your guts held in your hands.
He stared at a broken Barbie doll on the ground, poked it with one foot. Then turned towards the far side of the car park a hundred yards away when something large moved through the tall trees there and disturbed crows from the high branches. The birds cawed and dispersed. The sound of snapping sticks and the creak of branches pulled and pressed against. A creeping, distorted shape in the trees, without a proper form, like something made of smoke.
Royce made a low sound when the tip of a black tentacle broke from the cover of the skeletal boughs; then it was gone and he watched it recede and melt away, a shadow into shadows.
*
He moved through a park where the trees were like pagan effigies against a sky without colour, and abandoned next to the deserted playground was an ice cream van from which something raw and livid had crawled onto the grass and died in a tangled heap of red limbs and teeth. Beyond the park was a row of houses, where Royce picked through rooms thick with the stench of corruption. A family and its pet dog curled around one another in a living room still acrid with the smell of orangeade and weedkiller from empty glasses.
In a bedroom of the next house Royce found twin boys no more than six years old holding each other in death. Sinew, hair and bones in identical Transformers pyjamas. No clue as to what happened to their parents.
He spent the night in the living room of a red brick bungalow. Wrapped in a blanket on the floor, Royce passed in and out of sleep and imagined the faces of old work bosses looming over him and demanding to know why he’d clocked in late for his shift.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Daylight came from the east with the rise of birdsong in wild thickets. Royce walked for hours along roads and lanes and across fields of spreading weeds and dead crops. No more harvests and no more working in the fields. The countryside was silent.
He happened upon a petrol station just outside Glastonbury, and picked through the aisles for anything left behind by looters and scavengers. Loaves of bread reduced to mould specimens inside polythene bags. Behind the counter, Royce found a packet of mints, which he pocketed.
The fuel pumps were dry, and as he stood in the forecourt he heard approaching shrieks and feral cries from the south. He returned inside and hid in the aisles as a flock of infected passed through the forecourt and into the fields.
When the infected were gone, he re-emerged and carried on down the road, mindful of the crows circling overhead.
*
Where am I going?
He blew on his hands and rubbed them together as he walked, one foot after the other, and each step was another pointless movement. He looked at the sky. Looked at his shabby boots. Looked at the stones and the dead leaves on the worn tarmac, and the muddy slush at the side of the road.
Where are you going?
“I don’t know.”
You don’t know.
“I don’t know.”
You’ll die out here.
“Fuck off.”
Overgrown nettles and brambles reached for him. Thorns snagged his coat and pulled him back, and he had to crouch and quieten his breathing when something tall with rasping breath thrashed through the undergrowth to his right several yards away. Something passing through. Royce had the impression of a thin-limbed thing slick with secretions. Then he stood and moved on.
Two miles further on, he had to hide in a ditch when he stumbled upon a pack of infected clawing and scraping at an embankment to burrow into the rabbit warrens within. He watched in disgust and fascination as the infected tore into the earth and pulled the terrified animals from their shelters and went at them with their black teeth and palsied hands. Their naked, twitching forms maggot-pale against the black dirt. The rabbits struggled and made little sounds as they were caught, their legs kicking until the fur and skin were peeled from their squirming bodies. Small joints, bones and skulls popped and snapped between busy mouths. Sinew and ligament split and stuffed into wet maws.
The infected fed well. Small bodies were left ravaged and steaming on the cold ground. Rubbery organs, fleshy valves and lumps. Offal and skulls. A feeding frenzy.
One of the infected, a woman in a cooking apron flapping about her shins, stumbled down and through the ditch barely ten yards from where Royce was hiding, her head nodding like a bulbous flesh-sac. With her splintered mouth she tore at a small mound of grey fur and meat all limp and hanging in her hands. Gnawing at the bones. Too absorbed in the dripping pelt to notice him. Royce watched her vanish into the fields like a pale shadow.
He slipped away into the darkening murk before the monsters stripped the warren clean and went hunting for larger prey.
*
Royce spent the night in the back of a wrecked Mercedes van by the roadside, crammed amongst building supplies and tools. Muttering to himself, he fell asleep to the smell of plaster and emulsion.
He dreamed the dreams of an exhausted man. The chambers of his mind revealed in his slumber. The infected haunted him, gave him no respite. Shuttered nightmares of heads jerking and nodding as the mouths within them babbled and gibbered ceaselessly. And he was among a swarm of them, pulled and pushed within the pulsing mass of bodies, following the tide of their movements.
One mind. A whispering voice in the back of his skull. He looked around and saw people he once knew. Old friends he missed in the cold dark nights of his isolation, nothing in their eyes but animal hunger and the need to infect. The need to spread the plague and propagate, and make others like them.
Some of the infected continued to mutate around him: arms twisting into hooked appendages; faces splitting from chin to brow so that ponderous feelers could emerge and writhe; bones pushing against translucent skin, forming bodies into hunched, appalling positions. Black fluid wept from gnashing mouths. Swollen stomachs and sore lips pulled back from razor teeth. The stink of piss and dysentery. Many of the infected stood with their heads lowered as if in remembrance of their past lives; others stared at the black sky with their eyes bright and livid. A woman was hunched over with her hands worrying at her mouth, and there was something nasty between her teeth.
Royce noticed some of the infected still wore the torn remains of the uniforms from their old lives. Soldiers, police officers and nurses, paramedics, firemen and priests. A man chittering in the shredded rags of a mud-stained business suit.
Royce looked down at his feet and they were mired between slithering bodies that floundered and gasped and fed on each other with sucking mouths. There were children. He cried amongst them and tried to close his eyes but there were no lids to hide them, and when he clawed at his face the skin was like rice paper and it sloughed away to reveal his painted skull and the black hole now lipless and wet. Bones cracked in his limbs. He sobbed and wailed and thrashed as something from within a cosmic abyss spoke to him in a song of static, solar winds and black stars.
*
He woke to the slow creep of dawn and lay there for a while listening to blackbirds and sparrows in the hedgerows. Nature abides, he thought, and it brought him a note of comfort to know that birds would continue to sing and fly and raise their young in nests of small sticks, long after his death.
Royce spent the morning walking eastwards. Heavy rain swept the horizon to the north. He passed things in the road – a rain-sodden glove, a h
ubcap, a tennis ball. The pages of a celebrity gossip magazine flapped in a shallow puddle. He passed the fading shapes of villages, too fearful of what dwelled in those silent places.
Electrical appliances had been dumped on the flattened grass by the side of the road: a portable television, a microwave, a hairdryer. Burnt plastic and twisted wires in the pale yellow grass.
Drizzle began to fall, so Royce pulled the hood over his head and hid his face from the sky. Gravel and grit crackled under his feet. He stopped to tie his bootlaces and when he looked ahead, something by the side of the road caught his eye. The shape of a human form cowering in a tarp.
As Royce approached, he saw the suggestion of a face inside the thin hood.
The old man looked up at Royce. Solemn eyes ringed with grime above a grey scraggly beard. A man dwindling in the slow rain. There was a hatchet laid across his thighs.
Royce recognised him.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” the old man said, shivering in the drizzle. He eyed the shotgun. His voice a tired murmur through a dry mouth.
Royce appraised him and the hatchet in silence. “You okay?”
“Living the high life. You?”
Royce looked both ways of the road, and for an ambush. “Moving around. Bit of sightseeing.”
“I’m sorry about what happened, when I drove off and left you in the street with the infected. I panicked. I was scared.” A tremor passed over his lips as he scratched one side of his mouth.
“Don’t worry about it,” Royce said.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“What are you doing here?” Royce said.
The Plague Series (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 7
