The Plague Series (Book 2): The Last Outpost

by Hawkins, Rich

  The suspension was rattling. Some of the windows cracked, cleaved in fractures, covered in blood and gore. Infected were clinging to the coach, trying to tear at its sides. There was no way to fight them off.

  The doors burst open under the pressure of the thrashing bodies. The driver lost control of the coach; it veered from the road and skidded onto wet grassland, lost to its own inertia as blood-streaked figures with gasping mouths spilled on board. They pushed the stench of gangrene and slaughter before them. Justin fired his pistol at the invaders, but the shots went wild. The infected pulled the driver from his seat and opened him on the floor. He screamed once before his voice was lost to wet splutters and his throat was torn out. Justin fired again and one of the infected fell back with a hole in its chest and bits of the driver in its mouth.

  With no one to guide it, the steering wheel twisted as the coach crested the top of a slope and began to descend. The infected finished with the driver as Justin’s pistol clicked empty. Two of them, naked and covered in lesions, pulsing cysts and wet wounds, jerked their horrid faces towards Royce and came at him with reaching hands.

  The coach seemed to groan as it swerved with no one to control it. Metal and people screamed. Something gave way beneath the floor and the coach began leaning to one side with a terrible grinding. The snapping of pipes, precious tubes and wires. As the infected reached for Royce, the coach tipped over and the windows blew inwards and sent shards of glass through the air, piercing skin and soft faces. The blinded threw their hands to their eyes and screamed.

  The last thing Royce saw was an infected man’s face close to his own and blackened mouth yawning open to meet him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Royce awoke and found himself lying amongst long yellowing grass in the pouring rain, twenty yards from where the coach had ended its journey. He had been thrown clear during the descent.

  I should be dead. Why am I not dead?

  He spat mud from his mouth. Moved his limbs to check they were still attached and undamaged, wincing at the grinding pain in his legs. Arms shaking, he slowly ran his fingers over his face and they came away with blood from a shallow gash under his left eye. Small cuts in his skin, under the clothes torn during his passage to the long grass. When he took a breath there was a needling pain in his torso, but he would worry later about broken ribs and internal bleeding, if he survived the next few minutes. He kept low and looked around, flinching at nearby shrieks, his vision swaying and capering, then rose to an awkward crouch and saw hundreds of infected swarming down the slope towards the crippled coach, which was a shape of torn and crumpled metal. Screams and cries came from beyond the shattered windows. Glass, metal and scraps of plastic on the ground around its stricken corpse. And there were bodies too. Some looked dead. Some of them hung limply from the windows. An injured man was trying to crawl away from the wreck, but his left leg was bent the wrong way at the knee, and his strength was fading, judging by his pathetic pawing at the muddy ground.

  Royce looked for George and Amy, but from his position and distance he couldn’t see them, and he couldn’t tell if they were among the bodies. Maybe they had escaped and were hiding out in the fields or the nearby woods.

  The infected engulfed the wrecked coach and there was no hope for those trapped inside. Survivors were pulled out and set upon, torn apart and eaten alive.

  That was the last of the Family.

  A sound to his left made him turn, and a bleeding face emerged from the grass. The infected man must have been thrown from the coach along with Royce. The man skittered towards him like a crab, his body broken and mutilated but still obscenely driven by the base urges to feed and infect in his diseased brain. His jaw was broken, and the lower mandibles hung loose around the tongue uncoiling from the stinking hole of his mouth, and its tip was glistening, weeping fluid, dancing slowly as if trying to mesmerise him. Royce fell onto his back and kicked out, and his foot connected with the man’s face, snapping the cartilage in his nose. Gristle popped. The man fell away, hands scraping at the ground as he squealed in pain. Royce retreated on his back, slowly and painfully. His legs screamed, tender flesh and bruised skin being dragged over the earth. The grass smelled of ammonia.

  The infected man came back at Royce, nose bleeding, eyes rolling into the back of his head and his breathing excited and coarse. A low whine in his throat. The muscles in his face swelled and pulsed.

  The man was almost upon Royce, when his hand found a large stone and closed upon it. He thanked the rain for softening the ground so that he could prise it free. He took the stone and swung it against the side of the man’s head. The man made a low grunt as the jagged face of the stone sheared the skin from his forehead, and he slumped onto one side, his writhing tongue darting at Royce’s legs and narrowly missing.

  Royce scrambled away, dropped the stone and rose to his feet, staggering and swaying, wiping at his face to clear blood and sweat from his eyes. A pack of infected detached from the horde and screamed on his heels. There were sounds in the sky, but he kept his eyes on the ground.

  He fled into the woods, hoping to lose them among the trees, gritting his teeth and holding his left leg, hobbling on feet that felt like bleeding stumps. The pain in his ribs was immense, mind-consuming, and white-hot behind his eyes. He was close to passing out and part of him welcomed the chance to fall and let the infected take him, finally. But his legs wouldn’t fail him. Through undergrowth and dense foliage, the stink of rotting wood and mammalian scents in the dirt, snagging his clothes on briar patches and thorns. Wire-thin branches scratched at his exposed face, cutting his lips and around his eyes. By the time he slumped against a lichen-blotched oak and heard the infected crashing through the trees behind him, his face was covered in fresh shallow scratches and his chest shuddered with each breath.

  The infected screamed. Glimpses of movement.

  Royce took hold of the low branches above his head and pulled himself up. Agony shot through his arms. His feet gained purchase on the trunk, scraping away bark and slimy moss. Then he began to climb, his weak muscles straining and hurting, and all he could think of was where to place his hands and feet to escape the infected. When he could climb no further, his arms were numb and useless and his hands were raw, he stopped and slumped upon a thick branch and wrapped his limbs around the trunk, crowded by branches jabbing and raking at him. Through the skeletal canopy he could see parts of the sky.

  He pressed his face to the tree and closed his eyes.

  *

  Birds returned to roost in the surrounding trees as the light began fading into dusk. Royce drifted in and out of the world, finding sanctuary in exhaustion-dreams and snatches of oblivion. He was sheltered by the canopy; the threat of dying from exposure was only a peripheral blunt-toothed worry at the back of his mind.

  Darkness fell.

  *

  During the night he woke from a nightmare he couldn’t quite remember. Dream-memories of stinking maws and teeth, frenzied faces and glistening stingers. He was shivering all over and growing numb, his teeth chattering as the wind pulled at the trees. The thought of a slow death with the constellations above him. The sky was clear and full of stars, and he felt that he could touch them if he raised his arms and stretched, and then he could speak to the moon about the things it had seen. Occasionally he watched the starlit sky for the writhing of black tentacles. He didn’t think about his precarious position, but he often snapped awake, terrified he was already falling. He looked beneath him, to where the ground was hidden in darkness, and he heard woodland animals upon the dead leaves and bracken. Predators and prey. The bark of a fox far away. Sounds of wild seas in the treetops. The infected were gone.

  Later, in the dark hours, he thought he heard his name being called out in the woods, and he bit down on hysterical laughter. He had no time for ghosts.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  At first light he climbed down the tree and rested against the base of the trunk. The descent had ex
hausted him as much as the climb. He clasped his empty stomach and moaned. The woods were quiet around him and the low sun hurt his eyes as he peered through the trees. The sun set fire to the horizon.

  Footsteps slow and muddled, he returned to what remained of the coach and stood staring at the bodies scattered and displaced in bits and pieces around the wreck. Partially eaten corpses exposed to the dawn. Severed limbs, coils of intestine and viscera strewn about the mud. Many of the bodies were unrecognisable due to the violence of their deaths. Torn asunder and flayed. White bone sucked clean. Gnawed scraps of skin and perforated hides. The infected had fed well.

  Royce looked inside the wreck and found more remains. He put his hand to his mouth when the stench hit him, and closed his eyes to the onslaught of torn, matted hair, flesh and bone. The coach was gutted, and most of the supplies were trashed but he managed to scavenge some tins of soup, baked beans, and two energy bars, one of which he ate while shivering next to a headless corpse. He put his findings in a plastic bag he found in the pocket of a dead woman’s jacket.

  He was searching an opened corpse when a figure appeared from behind the coach, facing away from him. Someone whom Royce recognised from the sloping of the shoulders and the tennis shoes on the small feet.

  Royce didn’t move.

  George turned around, hunched over; his eyes were gone. The wounds on his face and neck glistened. His flayed hands made red fists. The skin visible through torn holes in his clothes was mottled with something like black rot. Royce wanted to call to him, to let him know he wasn’t alone. His heart winced as he remained crouched over the corpse, hoping the smell of ripening meat would mask his own scent.

  George sniffed at the air and his mouth opened to show broken teeth. He made a low sound, like an animal in distress, and turned in Royce’s direction, raising his hands and forming them into claws towards his chest. The joints of his limbs twitched.

  Birds lifted from nearby trees, black specks into the sky, and the sound of their wings caught the attention of the thing that used to be George. He stumbled away, palsied and famished, a vagrant monster off to roam the wasteland.

  Royce watched him leave and whispered goodbye.

  *

  Had he believed in the Devil, he would have imagined him on those back roads, tittering at his heels and whispering over his shoulder. Royce walked without knowing where to go, taking the roads that appeared before him in the dull haze of the weak winter sun. Guilt gnawed at his stomach. He was somewhere near the town of Andover, but thoughts of his location were lost in the fog of regret and loss. He didn’t care for the names of nearby towns and villages; better just to forget their names and consign them to the old world.

  His head hurt and his legs only worked in small shuffling steps. He wiped at his face with hands that didn’t feel like his own. As he passed a rundown chapel with a small graveyard, he turned towards the open mouth of its entrance, and the dark beyond it was filled with the sound of wet cracking and dismantling. He stood and watched the entrance for a while, hoping for something terrible to emerge from that darkness.

  The coast was far away, too distant to imagine, but he had decided to keep moving east. He had no disillusions about making it and he would probably die on the way there.

  Most of the day was spent walking, watching out for the horde. The sky remained clear and empty. The cold sun, the cruel sun.

  He found an old stable in a field away from the road. It was a simple structure, barely big enough for two horses in its stalls. Now vermin were the only occupants, watching him from small alcoves and hidden holes. He chased the rats from the beds of rotting straw and troughs of stinking hay blighted with damp and fungi. Stirrups, saddles and martingales hanging from the walls. He found a flea-ridden blanket draped over a metal hook and laid it on the straw-covered floor of the stall that faced towards the fenced field and the tell-tale mounds of horse bones in the grass. The shapes of hills beyond were dark against the fading sky. Fire in the west. Silence across the fields. The structures of winter-jaded trees all black and sharp.

  He sat on the blanket and noticed that the straw was lumpy underneath. A dried out smell, like old leather. He shifted and stood, removed the blanket. And when he pulled aside the straw he found the mummified remains of a man in similar clothes to his own. Skin like parchment, sucked of moisture, mouth agape. Royce searched the corpse and found a pack of cigarettes with a box of matches in a coat pocket. A wallet containing old photos and a Burger King coupon. Royce checked the driving license: Ben Jones. A square of patterned fabric, maybe from a woman’s dress. Royce restored it all, except the cigarettes and matches, to the man’s pockets then slowly replaced the straw upon him. Then Royce moved to the adjoining stall, but before he sat down he checked the straw on which he would make his bed.

  *

  He was still and silent, hidden by the ancient stink of the stable, and he fell into a deep sleep of exhaustion and regret as shadows grew over the fields.

  The evicted rats did not return.

  He dreamed that George visited him in the night, sat across from him on the old straw floor, and told him a story about the end of all life.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  In the morning the eaves were dripping with rain and banks of mist shrouded the hills beyond the fields. He ate half a tin of baked beans, scooping them into his mouth with his hands, and afterwards he stood in the rain and opened his face to the sky. When the rain fell harder, he retreated under the stable roof to smoke a cigarette and watch the fields. The nicotine salve in his soul couldn’t stop the shaking of his hands and the palpitations in his chest. He felt diseased. When he was a boy, his Catholic grandmother had told him every person was born sick and needed absolution. The mad bitch would have seen the plague as a judgement upon the world. Lung cancer killed her. She’d died in agony, stinking of piss and whiskey.

  He took a last hit from the cigarette before discarding it. Crushed it with one foot. Blue-grey smoke slipped between his teeth.

  Royce was sitting on the straw, waiting out the rain, when a dog came skulking around the stable. A black and white Border collie. The animal was soaked, trembling and filthy, nervously sniffing the ground. It noticed Royce huddled in a corner of the stall, and stiffened and gave a low growl from its throat. Royce held out his hands and watched the dog. There was a collar with a tarnished name tag around its neck.

  “It’s okay,” Royce whispered. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you, mate.”

  The dog’s ears flattened. Royce forced himself to look away and not antagonise the dog by keeping eye contact. His eyes searched for something to use as a weapon. If the dog attacked, he’d be reduced to using his bare hands to fend it off. He slipped one hand into the plastic bag by his side and took out the unfinished tin of baked beans, then scooped some out with his fingers and offered it to the dog.

  The dog sniffed at the air near his fingers. It took one step forwards, glancing at Royce then back at his hand.

  “It’s okay,” Royce said. “You hungry? I bet you are hungry, aren’t you?”

  The dog raised and turned its head to one side, whimpering as it sensed something nearby. And before Royce could say anything, the dog turned and fled into the rain. Royce ate the beans from his fingers, gathered the plastic bag and went outside.

  In the sky, several miles away, black tentacles moved like immense serpents in the clouds.

  *

  The rain lessened and Royce took to the road with the plastic bag clutched to his chest. Such a long time walking in the slow rain, a deathless death. Bruises swelling under his skin. The rain was pattering on the dirty sheet of tarpaulin draped over his head and shoulders. It sounded like the feet of panicking birds.

  Eastwards, towards the effigy of the sun murky and frayed behind miserable clouds. There was trash on the road; aluminium cans all crumpled and empty, rolling and rattling in the wind. He kicked one and it landed in a ditch where something in a shroud of festering rags grima
ced at him.

  For a while he stood and cupped his hands to drink the dregs of rainwater, and then he licked the remaining moisture from the creases of his calloused palms.

  *

  Royce watched a flock of infected sweep across a distant hillside. The way the flock changed direction, like birds on the wing, was almost beautiful. Further on, he found a black limo parked in a layby. The engine was dead. The limo sagged on deflated tyres mired in mud and dead leaves, and when he opened one of the back doors a rancid stink hit him and he had to step back. The seats were occupied by bodies clad in expensive suits and dresses. The remains of cocaine, heroin and ketamine in little polythene bags. Dirty syringes and empty bottles of champagne, rum, gin, tequila and vodka.

  A group suicide. Eight bodies, in all. A party to end all parties, while the country burned.

  The bodies were skeletal, faces drawn tight over skulls and slouched postures. Vacant expressions below mops of feathery hair. Papery skin over entwined limbs and bony fingers. One of the bodies, a woman in a black strapless dress, had slumped face-first onto the lap of the man next to her. No dignity in death. The corpses were decorated with gold rings, silver necklaces, bracelets and earrings. He placed his hand around a woman’s wrist so thin that his fingers completely encircled it. He imagined she had been beautiful, as he put her hand to his face so that her stick-like fingers brushed against his cheek. He looked into her face, and for a second, saw his wife. And it was too much to look into her face any longer, so he released her with a small sob, climbed out of the limo and closed the door.