The Plague Series (Book 2): The Last Outpost

by Hawkins, Rich

  The message was repeated in Danish, Norwegian, French and German before the transmission ended, and when Amy turned off the radio the silence it left behind weighed heavily like the aftermath of an accusation. Royce wiped at his face. George put one hand to his mouth. Amy looked at the men, her dirty face hopeful and pale.

  “I can’t believe it,” said George.

  “They repeat the message on the hour, every hour,” said Amy. “Different people, different nationalities. They take it in turn, like a rota system.”

  “Do you think it’s real?” said Royce. “It might be a trap, a way to lure people there.”

  “For what reason?” Amy said.

  “Humans are capable of horrendous things,” said Royce. “Particularly now.”

  “We ran into some people a few weeks ago,” said George. “It didn’t end well.”

  “You’d ignore it, then?” Amy asked.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s hope,” said Amy. “Hope for my baby. Hope for all of us.”

  Royce didn’t seem impressed. “Hope is a fickle bitch.”

  *

  The dark came on and pressed against the windows. They shared the last tin of baked beans and talked about the old world. Movies and songs, celebrities and TV shows. Amy talked about her favourite albums and George lamented the loss of freshly-baked bread and cream cakes. Royce didn’t say much, just drank from the old bottle of gin he’d found in the cupboard under the stairs and grew steadily more drunk as the night passed. They did not talk about their lost loved ones.

  At some point in the night they heard a high-pitched shriek from somewhere out in the fields; it silenced them and prompted George to keep the revolver by his side.

  Amy slept on the sofa, swamped in blankets, while Royce retired to his bedroom with what remained of the gin to leave George alone with his thoughts, his fears, and his hunger scraping at his guts. He sat at the kitchen table, listening to the hourly broadcasts from Denmark. Between the transmissions he used a bread knife to carve the names of dead people into the table.

  He kept the volume low and leaned his face close to the radio, wishing he could reply to them; to plead with them to save him, Royce, Amy, and her unborn baby.

  He sat there for a long time.

  The voices of all the people brought him to tears.

  *

  Amy was already up and gathering her belongings when George woke. He remembered his dreams of maternity wards being ravaged by the infected.

  “Morning,” said Amy. She sipped water from a bottle.

  George stood. “Morning.” He looked around. “I guess Royce isn’t up yet.”

  “What happened to him?” Amy said.

  “Last night?”

  “Before. During the outbreak.”

  “Oh, right. He had a family. A daughter. But he can’t remember what they looked like because he lost all the things he had to remember them.”

  Amy nodded, stroked her stomach.

  George looked at the names carved in the table.

  “Will you and Royce come with me?” Amy said. “To the coast, at least. I could use the company, and there’s safety in numbers, don’t you think?”

  “I thought about it last night,” George said. He looked around the cold grey kitchen and thought that if he stayed here for another night it would be the end of him. “There’s nothing here. We’ve almost run out of food.”

  “So is that a ‘yes’?”

  “Do you trust us?” he said.

  “As much as I need to. I don’t have a choice. If you or Royce were going to rape or kill me, you’d have done it by now.”

  “It’s a long way to go. Somerset to the east coast. We’ll have to walk if we can’t find a vehicle. Chances are we won’t make it. And even if we do, there’s still the North Sea to be crossed.”

  “I have to try,” said Amy. “What else is there to do?”

  Royce appeared in the doorway; they hadn’t heard him descend the stairs. He rubbed his eyes, the smell of stale gin and vomit steaming off him. “Are we leaving?”

  “If you want to, Royce,” Amy said. “We’ll go together.”

  His eyes lingered on her stomach. He sighed. “Fair enough. Better to die out there than in this shithole.”

  He turned away and returned upstairs.

  *

  They listened to the next broadcast and gathered their remaining provisions. There was hardly any food and only two bottles of water between them. George was dismayed when he remembered there were only two bullets left in the revolver and there was such a long way to go. He thought he would die on the road with Amy and Royce. But it was better to die in the rain with the sky above you than inside a stinking house full of other people’s memories.

  “Maybe we should burn the house down,” said Royce.

  “Let’s just go,” said George.

  Amy nodded biting her lip.

  “Are you okay?” George asked her.

  “I’ll be fine once we get going,” she said. She saw Royce watching her, but said nothing.

  “We’ll need to find a vehicle eventually,” George said. “Otherwise it’ll take weeks to walk to the coast, and I don’t think we’re capable of that.”

  Royce looked out the window. “It’s raining. What a surprise.”

  They went out into the rain and left the house behind. George turned back one last time and was glad to leave.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  They were hungry when they left the house and the drizzle was constant upon them. Three grey, slumped shapes meandering across the countryside. Bowed heads and shuffling footsteps. George imagined the land all ransacked and devastated, the three of them as transients walking the hills. He turned his head to appraise the land around them, and wondered if leaving the house was a grave mistake and it would kill them.

  “An aberration of a world,” Royce said to the ground, his hands close to his face. George looked at him, but Royce stared straight ahead, down the road where it stretched into the rain. George didn’t ask what he’d meant. He watched Amy scuffing her feet beside them, her face peering out from beneath her dripping hood. She coughed, wiped her mouth, and exhaled white mist into the air as she clutched her coat to her body like she was scared of losing it. The coat’s hem flapped around her knees.

  George put one hand to his stomach and felt the prominent ribs under his clothes. His throat was raw and dry, so he raised his face to the sky and opened his mouth to catch the rain.

  *

  With his foot Royce poked the carcass of a deer half-hidden in the nettles at the side of the road. The deer had been dead for a while, the skin and flesh stripped away along its spine. Yellowed bones and wet fur. A flayed hide under the rain. Its eyes were gone.

  “I wonder what killed it,” said Amy. She looked around. “Infected?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said George. “It’s been dead a long time. Whatever killed it is probably long gone.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I rarely am.”

  *

  The peak of a church tower and a wind-blown flag atop it rose above the ranks of distant trees.

  There was a car on the road. Royce searched its boot while George checked the compartment under the dashboard and Amy sat in the driver’s seat and rested her legs. She drank from her water bottle and when she saw how much was left she slumped back against the seat. George found nothing of use in the front of the car. A user’s manual and a paperback novel with a bookmark near the end. Royce appeared from behind the car and shook his head when George asked if he’d found anything.

  They rested for a while, sheltering from the rain, listening to the tapping of the downpour on the roof. George suggested trying the village for supplies. Amy tried the ignition, but the car was dead and the scraping of something in the broken engine was its death-rattle.

  They waited until the rain stopped before they moved on.

  *

  The first house they
came to had been burnt from within and the glass was gone from the windows. George checked the ruins but there was only ash inside the walls.

  They found the first scarecrow soon afterwards, strapped into a cruciform shape upon a wooden cross and planted in an overgrown garden, limbs of rotting straw jutting from the moth-eaten suit jacket covering its raggedy torso. A bowler hat upon its cloth-covered head, atop a face with a merry smile painted in red. The eyeholes had been pecked out by birds. Spikes of the rank straw spilling through the knees of its tattered corduroy trousers. Royce stared at the blind effigy until George placed one hand on his shoulder, and he turned to look at George and his face was wan and bewildered.

  “Come on,” George said, worried about the look in Royce’s eyes.

  Royce nodded. Amy was standing behind them, looking down the road into the village.

  “There are more,” she said.

  Other lawns held scarecrows clothed in jumble sale rags and assorted ludicrous hats. One of them wore a woman’s summer hat similar to one George’s mother used to wear when he was a boy and the family went on trips to the seaside.

  They searched the nearby houses for food, but found nothing. George felt like crying but he was too tired.

  “Stripped clean,” said Royce, chewing on a fingernail.

  Amy looked at the men and dug her hands inside her pockets, shivering in the cold. The drizzle was falling again, slowly turning to sleet.

  “Are you okay?” George asked her.

  She nodded and tried to smile. “Fine. Just hungry.”

  “We’ll find something,” said George.

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” Royce said.

  “There has to be something left to eat.”

  Royce said nothing, just stared at the scarecrows as if he was waiting for them to animate and come shuffling towards him on their legs of mouldering straw.

  *

  There was a man crucified on the village green, and by the deterioration of the corpse he had been there for weeks. Putrid and sunken, skin almost black with rot. A stench of corruption. His eyes were gone, pecked away by birds, like the scarecrow’s. Scavengers had been at the soft parts of the body where the stained clothes were torn. His hands had been nailed to the horizontal wooden beam, palms facing outwards, and there were long, thick iron spikes through his ankles, which had also been lashed to the vertical beam. A cord of rotting rope around his neck kept him tightened to the wooden cross.

  “Oh my god,” said Amy. She laid her hands on her stomach in a protective gesture. “Why would someone do that to a person?”

  “Madness,” said Royce. “Peel away the skin of Man...”

  “I wonder who he was,” said Amy. “What did he do to deserve this?”

  No one answered.

  “Should we cut him down?”

  George and Royce exchanged a look; Royce shrugged and looked away.

  “There’s nothing we can do for him,” George said, staring at the body. “His suffering is over.”

  *

  In one of the houses on the next street, they scrounged a tin of marrowfat peas fallen down the back of a kitchen cupboard and missed by other scavengers. George checked that the tin was intact before he pocketed it.

  Night closed in and the shrill calls of the infected came out of the growing dark. George and Royce secured the house as best they could and settled with Amy in the living room and shared the peas in the shivering flame of a candle. George sat in the dust-stinking armchair and with his thumb and forefinger picked cold peas from the small amount in his other hand, placing them in his mouth and cringing as his teeth mashed them into paste. When he looked at Royce and Amy they wore similar expressions. Royce sat on the floor with his back against the section of wall by the bay window. Amy slumped on the sofa, dirty blankets over her shoulders and legs. George finished his portion and licked the pea-juice from his hands, while Amy drank the water left in the tin. Nothing was left to waste.

  *

  And then they talked of the old things and customs now obsolete in the plague-ravaged world.

  “I miss Facebook,” Amy said, the faintest hint of a smile on her face. “My husband told me I was addicted to it. I loved playing Candy Crush.”

  “What’s Candy Crush?” said George.

  “It’s a game,” Royce said.

  George frowned. “Sounds like a waste of time.”

  “It was,” Royce said. “I preferred FarmVille.”

  Amy wiped at one eye. “I wish I had given my husband more attention instead of playing stupid games on the computer. But you never think it’ll come to an end, do you? You think things will always carry on the way they are and you’ll have plenty of time to sort things out.” She looked at the candle’s flame, her mouth thin, eyes aglow and glassy. “He was a good man, and he always did the right thing. He didn’t deserve to die.”

  “We’ve all got regrets,” said George. “I wish I could have said goodbye to my son and his family. My grandsons.” He closed his eyes and saw Billy and Daniel, but it was just a glimpse of them and they were soon gone, back into the dark. “I don’t even know if they’re alive or dead. Part of me thinks it’d be better if they were dead, then I could mourn for them.” His windpipe tightened and something hard formed in his throat.

  Royce was watching George. The house breathed around them. The night, at least in this little corner of the world, seemed peaceful, and George was grateful for that.

  Royce cleared his throat and he looked at the floor between his feet. “I’d give anything to see my wife and daughter again. I’d kill to see them again. Just for that one last chance.”

  Then Royce was silent, and soon they were all asleep.

  *

  George awoke in the night to the sound of titans in the sky, high above the house. He pulled the blanket up to his chest and listened, fascinated and terrified.

  What are you? Where are you from?

  Eventually the titans moved away. Amy was sobbing quietly within the darkness. He listened to her, ashamed to be doing so, as if he were a voyeur to her grief. He thought about her unborn child and imagined it as something alien and writhing ripping itself from Amy’s womb when the time had come for it to be born. He imagined, with a shiver of revulsion, a plague-ridden thing that would feed on its mother for sustenance, and kill her by doing so.

  It took him a long while to get back to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  George was awake before first light. From an upstairs window he watched the first stains of yellow, orange and red on the horizon. The sky was clear except for some distant banks of cloud, and he hoped it was a good sign. He was light-headed and thirsty, like a man made of dried sticks and dust. He rested against a wall and ran his hands over his face, his teeth itching and aching, and moaned at the discomfort of his grinding bones. He looked into the mirror on the landing and dread filled him at the thought of the day ahead. If they couldn’t find a working vehicle with fuel, they’d be forced to walk, and he knew deep down he wasn’t capable of it. And he would die on the road.

  He walked downstairs and found Royce standing by the living room window, peering through a gap in the curtains as Amy slept. Royce turned his head towards George and put his forefinger across his mouth. He flicked his head towards the window. His knife was in his hand.

  George went to the edge of the window and pulled the curtains back just enough so he could see outside through the net curtain. He flinched at the sight of infected people moving past the house and down the road, heading back the way he, Royce and Amy had travelled. They filled the street from one side of the road to the other, trampling over gardens and lawns. George attempted to count their number, but he couldn’t keep up with the flow of bodies marching past. There were hundreds. A swarm. George watched them pass in their droves – malformed limbs and mouths; weeping sores and thin tendrils erupting from skin. Appalling effigies of men, women and children. Naked bodies entangled into hellish shapes. Faces stripped of skin, sprou
ting cilia and glistening stingers. Shambling figures screamed at the sky. Hairless things with onyx claws, pale spikes rising from their spines. Some of them still wore the remnants of their clothes, torn and flapping and filthy with bloodstains and dried excrement. There were soldiers among them, those who had succumbed to the plague during the battle for the mainland. People from all walks of life, classes and professions, all of them joined in their hunger to infect and feed. Driven by the terrible pestilence.

  A priest stumbled past, still wearing his dog collar and black garments, his twisted ankle trailing behind him. The mandibles of his jaws were distended and twinging, his face covered in lesions, and something pink and worm-like darted from his dripping mouth. Many of the infected bore injuries and wounds. Gangrenous limbs all thin and inflamed, shivering in the cold air. The stench of their unwashed bodies and infected sores must have been horrendous.

  Royce said nothing as he watched them. Neither did George; he was filled with awe and horror. Words were scant things against such a sight.

  Gradually the swarm dwindled into wandering packs and lone stragglers and then they were gone. George moved away from the window and sat down to calm the shaking of his limbs, the riot of his heart.

  *

  After searching several houses already looted bare, they left the village by way of the main road, exhausted and hungry under a clear sky. But the sun was weak and did nothing to warm them. There had been nothing for breakfast but a few sips of water each. George wanted to sleep, wanted the world to go away. He looked at Amy and saw her rubbing her stomach.