The old man sighed. A forlorn creature at the end of the world. “I don’t know. I’m so tired. So tired.” His head was nodding faintly. “Stopped here to rest. I think I fell asleep. Not sure. Not sure of anything. Are you real?”
“Just as real as you.”
“Or maybe we’re just the last imaginings of a dying race. Maybe we’re just ghosts drifting along the road.”
Royce stretched his neck and winced at the dull pain down his spine. He scanned the countryside around them, then back at the man. “Where were you heading?”
“Just walking the roads. Trying to avoid the infected. What about you?”
“The same.”
“Can I come with you?”
Royce eyed the black tarmac stretching away through the low hills and rises.
“We should stick together,” the old man said. “We could be the last two left alive.”
“I’m not carrying any of your stuff,” said Royce.
The man nodded and rose to his feet in his tattered trainers. A padded jacket and stained rucksack under the dripping tarp. He offered a grimy hand, and he smelled of wet hair and blocked drains. “I’m George. Pleased to meet you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They kept to the roads as the drizzle turned to sleet in the biting cold. The wind ghosted through tree tops and stirred the long grass around the bases of the dripping trunks gnarled by age and winter.
“Have you seen anything in the skies?” George asked.
Royce watched the roadsides and the shadows beneath the trees. “Like what?”
“Planes or helicopters. Hot air balloons.”
Royce glanced at him and frowned. “Nothing. Not since the first days of the outbreak.”
“Have you seen any of those things? You know…those things in the clouds.”
“Not very often.”
“What do you think they are?”
“You ask a lot of questions, George.”
“I’m making conversation.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“Yes.”
“Fair enough.”
“So…what do you think they are?”
Royce kicked at a stone and it bounded into a ditch. “I don’t know what they are. Does it matter? We can’t do anything about them. The plague has already done its worst.”
George nodded at the sky. “They’re from out there, somewhere. Beyond the stars.”
“You know that for certain?”
“What else could they be?”
“I don’t know.”
George didn’t speak for a while, and then he said, “Alien gods.”
Royce looked at him. “Really?”
“Things beyond our comprehension, Royce. Entities that see us as insects to be destroyed or used for other purposes.”
“So you think they unleashed the plague to eradicate us like we’re a nest of insects?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You got any other theories?” Royce said.
“Spores,” George said.
“What?”
“Those things released spores that infected the population. As far as we know, the plague hit worldwide in the space of a few hours. That’s not a simple virus, Royce.”
Royce scanned the fields, blinking at the sleet falling at his face. His arms were going numb. Nothing moved out there. “Sounds like some type of biological weapon.”
“Exactly.”
“Interesting theory.”
“I know. I’ve got more.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Royce said. “Do you think that rats wonder about how the exterminator kills them? Do aphids question the pesticide that destroys them?”
“I don’t know,” George said.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Royce. “None of that shit matters.”
George said nothing and looked away. They walked in silence for the rest of the afternoon.
*
They found a building site on the outskirts of a village and sheltered for the night in a portacabin. The sleet became rain and fell heavily as the light was reduced to a sliver on the horizon and the desperate calls of the infected echoed from all directions.
Royce ate chocolate and wrapped the blanket tighter around his shoulders. He barely had the energy to work his jaw to chew the food before he swallowed it. George sat across from him, huddled with his back against the wall, scraping cold baked beans from a tin with a plastic fork. A candle between them, against the dark and the howling wind.
A desk and an office chair against the far wall, on which a calendar with a different topless model for each month hung. Charts and notices on a corkboard, and dry taps above a metal sink. A pile of high-vis vests in their polythene packets. A dead computer. Empty plastic cups still retained the faint scent of coffee.
“Do you think we’re safe here?” George said between mouthfuls of beans.
“Safe enough,” said Royce. “Better than spending the night on the road.”
George looked at the ceiling, towards the sound of pelting rain. “I hope the infected catch their death in this weather.”
*
Royce could hear the sheets of tarpaulin draped on the skeletal frames of the unfinished houses outside, flapping in the wind and rain.
George had finished the beans. He sipped from a bottle of water. “Do you realise that it’s New Year’s Eve tonight?”
Royce had lost track of the days. Conflated days and nights and unending hours. Darkness and light. “I had no idea. Fucking hell.” He rubbed at his face and blew air through his mouth. “I even forgot about Christmas.”
George was looking at his hand. “No presents under the tree this year.”
“I used to love Christmas dinners,” Royce said. “All the trimmings.”
George nodded. “I should be at home with the missus, a good bottle of whiskey, and a Hitchcock film. That was our tradition on New Year’s Eve.” He looked at the floor and chewed on his bottom lip.
“Sounds nice,” said Royce.
“It was. Yes, it was.”
There was no talk for a while. The men listened to the rain.
*
At the start of the outbreak, George had been living in Exeter with his wife. The city had fallen to the infected within days and he had been among the first civilians transported to a refugee camp further south. The old man’s voice was a small sound barely heard above the sound of the rain. He spoke matter-of-factly, as if reciting a list of plans and schemes. But Royce saw the pain in his eyes, the look of being haunted by the dead and the living. Royce recognised it from the times he had stared at his own reflection in the last few months.
“It was chaos,” George said. “So many of the infected. They found the camp and attacked. The camp was overrun. The remaining soldiers abandoned the camp and left the surviving refugees to fend for themselves. Most were killed or infected. I escaped, barely, with a group of people. Some children. We hid, we ran, but in the end I was the last one left. Me. An old man. I managed to survive the following months by cowering in back rooms and the ruins of buildings.”
“But you survived,” said Royce.
“But I shouldn’t have survived,” George said. “And I’d give anything to die so that one of those children could live.”
Royce looked at the shotgun nearby. “I know what you mean.”
They talked about the possibility of other survivors and the end of their species. They talked about extinction.
“Part of me thinks this isn’t real,” said George. “How would we know? What is real? Someone once said to me that our reality is just a memory of a dream.”
“Poetic,” Royce said.
George removed his tattered trainers and filthy socks. The trainers were slowly coming apart. The skin of his feet was black with grime. Dirt under his toenails and callouses on his soles, dried skin flaking on his worn heels. The big toe of his right foot was swollen. George rubbed his feet and grimaced. The smell was awful, fecund
and damp, putrid dairy. Royce watched George knead the pale flesh with his grubby fingers.
“Do you ever think much about the past?” said George, as his hands worked.
“Sometimes. More than I should.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it’s pointless. It doesn’t help matters.”
George covered his bare feet with a blanket. “It helps to remember the old world. To honour the dead and the lost things.”
Royce shook his head. “Nostalgia’s addictive. Once you start wrapping yourself in old memories you may as well sit down in the road and let the monsters take you.”
*
Later, as rain lashed against their shelter, George checked his pocket watch and counted down to midnight, and when the hands struck twelve there was no celebration and no hope for the days ahead. Just a quiet acknowledgement between the two men.
Royce took the bottle of vodka from his bag and poured large measures into two chipped mugs he’d found in the cupboard under the sink.
“To absent friends,” George said.
They tipped their mugs and drank to the New Year.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The first day of the year was much the same as the days before. The men had waited for a lull in the rain before they left the portacabin. Royce had found scratch marks on the outside of the door and footprints in the mud.
George was struggling in his deteriorating shoes, and he had to stop every few hundred yards to readjust them on his feet while Royce kept watch over the twisting roads and the dark slopes of land. He tried to pinpoint the distant calls and howls of the infected across the windswept countryside dulled in shades of iron and ochre.
Royce thought about his dreams the previous night, of dark matter and dying suns. He could remember his dreams with such clarity it was unnerving. And not for the first time that day he looked to the sky and felt weightless, tiny and insignificant.
“Do you think anyone else is out there?” George said. “Do you think we’ll find someone else?”
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” said Royce. He cradled the shotgun in his aching arms. He spat. His nose was cold. The trees to the left of the road dripped rainwater from their black limbs. He saw a body tangled in a dense patch of weeds, its bare feet sticking out of the brush. There was a low, resonating wail from somewhere in the distance. Some kind of monster calling across the bare fields.
George shivered, pulled his collar closer to his neck. Royce shook his legs to quicken the blood inside them.
“Maybe we should’ve stayed at the building site,” George said.
“No,” said Royce. “I’m not going to sit on my arse in a fucking portacabin and wait to die. Better to keep moving, George.”
“Why is it better? Where are we going?”
Royce sniffed, looked at the old man. “You asked to come with me, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I know, but…”
“But what?”
“I don’t know. I thought there’d be a shelter somewhere. A place to hide.”
“Hiding places never stay hidden,” said Royce. “The infected always find you. The only way to stay alive is to keep moving.”
“What happens when you run out of hiding places, Royce?”
Watching the swaying trees, Royce said, “What happens to all prey, eventually.”
“And that is…?”
“Capture and death, George.”
*
A kestrel flitted above a field with its wings angled downwards and its head centred upon a spot on the ground below. The men watched when it dove and then rose seconds later with a wriggling shrew or mouse in its razor beak. George muttered something that sounded like an expression of admiration.
It rained heavily in the afternoon, and with the gutters and drains all blocked by the accumulation of several months’ worth of leaves, wind-blown litter and detritus, the rainwater pooled on the roads and turned some into shallow rivers. The wind spat the rain into their faces, and George’s feet were soaked because of the holes in his trainers, so they sheltered in the cab of an articulated lorry abandoned by the side of the road. Royce found a stash of crumpled porn magazines in the back of the cab under the fold-out bed. He laughed grimly at the women pouting in gynaecological poses and exaggerated, unlikely positions. Those faked expressions of lust and hunger. George glared at him as he flipped through the magazines. He put them away.
“If you’re into that sort of thing, be my guest,” George said. “I won’t judge.”
Royce put the magazines on the floor. “Seems ridiculous now.”
George climbed onto the fold-out bed and lay down after taking off his wet coat, trainers and socks. He wrapped himself in his blanket and stared at the ceiling.
“I’ll keep watch,” Royce said.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
After a few minutes he glanced back at her and saw George was asleep. Then he reached down and picked up one of the magazines.
*
The rain had stopped and they were walking down the road, stepping around and over puddles and pools of water. A rainbow shimmered in the distance miles ahead.
Royce would not turn to look at George.
“It’s okay,” George said.
“No, it’s not okay. It’s embarrassing.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “You shouldn’t care.”
“Well, I do.”
“You were only wanking,” said George. Royce groaned and shook his head. “Get over it, Royce. You’re only human.”
Royce’s face burned in the cold air and his stomach cramped. He grumbled to himself. They walked on.
“Royce, our race could be close to extinction,” George said, “and you’re fretting because I caught you cracking one off. Don’t worry about it.”
Royce stopped and turned to him. “Don’t tell me what to worry about, old man.” His voice was harsher than he’d intended, and he saw George’s eyes harden in the pale light. George pursed his mouth and was about to reply when his gaze moved past Royce’s shoulder and stopped upon something in the field behind him.
“What’s wrong?” Royce said.
George ignored him.
Royce turned to where George was staring.
About a hundred yards away, a female grizzly bear and her two cubs had emerged from the dark bracken at the edge of some woodland and were ambling across the field next to the road, moving in the opposite direction to Royce and George. George said something, but it was so mumbled that Royce couldn’t make out the words, and he didn’t ask him to repeat himself.
Royce watched the bears with something like awe and shock. They must have escaped, or had been released, from a zoo; a torn fence or a sympathetic zoo employee who’d opened the cages to give them a chance as the world burned.
The cubs pawed and nipped playfully at each other then, when they realised they’d fallen behind their mother, scampered across the waterlogged land after her. There was a shallow slash as long as Royce’s arm through the shaggy hair along the mother’s rippling flank, and her snout was stained dark red. She had fought something recently. Royce wondered what could have done that to her. The mother turned back to her cubs and made a deep, low, resonating sound to them that turned Royce’s guts cold and made him want to hide in a ditch with his eyes squeezed shut. Then, once the cubs had caught up, she stopped and lowered her large snout to the ground and sniffed at the dirt, swaying her head around as if to catch the scent of something nearby. Plumes of breath from her open mouth. Those teeth. The concave skull, so thick and powerful. Those jaws. A long mane atop the back of her neck. She must have weighed about five-hundred kilos, at a conservative estimate, and had to be over two metres long.
Royce and George crouched on the road and tried to peer through the low hedgerow hiding them from the field.
The bear snorted then huffed. The cubs could be heard complaining with little barks and mewls.
Royce heard George bre
athing behind him. Did the bear know they were there? As his stomach shrivelled and the backs of his legs began to ache from crouching, he waited for the bear to start towards them. This was how early humans had felt in those early millennia of tooth and claw. They had no chance of outrunning her, if it came down to that, and Royce didn’t think the shotgun would stop her unless he shot her in the head at point blank range. But he didn’t want to hurt her or make her cubs orphans. He had no wish to harm them.
He listened for snorting breaths and the pounding of large paws on the ground. Gritted his teeth, put the shotgun to his shoulder, his legs shaking, and stood.
The bears were moving away towards the end of the field, back the way Royce and George had come. Within seconds they had disappeared into the trees, and it was easy to think he had merely imagined them. He stared in that direction for a long time after they were gone.
George stood and breathed out. They looked at each other. George appeared as relieved as he felt. He was gripping the hatchet.
“Makes you wonder what else is roaming around out here,” George said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They walked for another mile in the weak light until George had to stop and sit on the muddy grass verge to rest his feet. The sole of his left trainer was loose and flapping like an old gossip’s tongue. He swore as he undid the laces and pulled the trainer from his foot. His socks were wet and filthy. His shoulders sagged. “That’s just fucking great. Lucky I haven’t caught trench foot yet.”
“There are worse things to catch,” said Royce.
George’s eyes moved in their sockets towards Royce. “That’s not much of a comfort.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.” Royce stared down the road, where it disappeared under a canopy of trees overhanging from the rising embankments. He pulled the map from his pocket. “We’re about two miles from the nearest town. We’ll find some boots there. Hopefully.”
George pulled off his sock, and his feet were blackened. Royce hadn’t seen his own feet in over a month, too scared of what he might find.
The Plague Series (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 8
