The Dead Boy

by Saunders, Craig

  Francis figured they were in that middle place - the byways that joined the country like the veins of England's bottom-heavy body. Where that traffic would ordinarily flow, constant, it fell to night-time volume within a day. By the time she ventured outside again, Francis saw barely any movement at all.

  On the horizon, perhaps five or twenty miles away (it was impossible to guess) smoke filled the day, fire lit the night.

  Francis' concerns were closer. Ten feet away was a Nissan - a family car, high. The kind she'd never had cause to drive. But families with kids kept things, didn't they? The family was gone - wherever, it didn't matter to Francis. They'd been a day with nothing but crisps and a few biscuits. She imagined she'd drool if they found baby food, even.

  Ten feet, she thought. Fuck's sake.

  Her left foot - the one she'd torn free of the lunatic's farmhouse floor - was far worse than the right. The right, she'd bound with duct tape and called good. The left was seeping, a bandage of torn and dirty shirt held down enough to keep the foot together, but not good enough to heal.

  Edgar's got it worse, she thought as she stared at her goal - the car that might contain food, drink, or medical supplies. A simple first aid kit would be better than what they had now - caretakers' things.

  George has it worse, she thought, trying to push her fear of more pain away.

  He doesn't complain.

  Edgar, the old bastard, complained endlessly. He was near to delirium with the pain, but it didn't change the fact that he wouldn't fucking shut up.

  But then George is mute and paralysed.

  'Fuck off, Francis,' she told herself, because her thoughts were turning mean. As was she. She was tired and hurting and her left foot was infected, the bones inside broken without doubt. Duct tape can only cure so much.

  Barefoot and crawling, she still didn't want either foot to take any weight, or touch anything at all. If she was still, the pain brought tears. If she knocked either foot the pain became bright enough to blind.

  Concerned yourself living, not dying, she thought. Death's got enough on his plate.

  Those distant fires and the dried-up traffic weren't hard to understand. People dying all over. O'Dell's work?

  No doubt at all.

  It was just hard to mourn, even cry, when you were busy mourning for yourself - all the things you lost, all the pain you feel, your hunger and your fear - a mind gets overfull, sometimes. We bail our thoughts out so we don't sink.

  Crawl, then, she said, almost baiting herself, winding herself up. Minds need to be tricked sometimes, too, into doing things they rail against.

  In the distance, small shapes moved over the fields, roaming wild. Herds, but people, rather than animal.

  But wild, for sure.

  'Crawl,' she said, not needing trickery any longer.

  She did. Hands and knees toward the abandoned Nissan. The short distance hurt.

  The car was empty except for two crochet blankets, like babies had from grandmothers who knew the makings of such things.

  The world's going to need a hell of a lot of grandmothers, she thought, disappointed and angry, too. She took the blankets, though, because something was better than nothing. Not as good as food, water, or medicine. They would die without these things.

  She swore, eyed the herd (still distant) and began the slow, aching crawl to the next nearest car. Dark wasn't far off.

  At the next stop she found two chocolate bars in the glove compartment, and a packet of Anadin in a side pocket. A pair of sunglasses, too. They were prescription and no good for anyone, probably. When she took them off, the wild people walking in the distance were closer, brighter.

  Time to get back.

  Those people weren't her friends. The first of many people who weren't friendly. In those first few weeks, the mad ruled.

  *

  The maintenance room was cramped but it was beneath tons of concrete and steel, the door hidden in shadows during the day and close enough to invisible at night. There were plenty worse places to wait on the apocalypse.

  Nights darkened after the fires died down. No one came to fight those blazes. They burned until there was little left for the fires to feast on. The crazed forgot the lighting of fires, then, almost rabid in their madness, and their fury. Some recovered quicker than others, some not at all, and some liked it.

  But O'Dell brought new fire.

  The herd thinned. The strongest would survive...but the weak, too. Deer and wolves...a place for all in the new world.

  *

  The three survivors slept like people did before electricity, or even candles - when it got dark, they closed their eyes and slept or listened for noises in the night. They ate the way people had before times of plenty - when they could.

  The small stocks of food that Francis' stole or found or scrounged did not last. They spent long, slow days by talking and telling their stories out loud and in their heads. Healing was a large part of it - willpower and time and luck - but mostly will. The mind leads and the body follows because it is told to. Broken bones, severed nerves, torn or excised flesh...these things never heal completely. Injuries like that are pains that can be mastered, though. A limp, or writing re-learned. It takes months or years, perhaps, but people adapt, and that fact remained true.

  They waited to see if they'd die. If they didn't, they weren't going to.

  Only once did anyone scream closer enough for them to hear. High-pitched, but a man. A few days later Francis found the man and didn't vomit or cry and knew she could handle it.

  Still handling it, she thought, but that night she woke from a nightmare and screamed just as the dead man had.

  She took to roaming in the dark after a fortnight. In the day, she could see danger, but it could see her, too. Somewhere out there, the mad roamed and she didn't want to endure what they would do.

  She thought of the Kssh-Ksash man. Questioning, hungry.

  He was dead, but others weren't - not yet.

  *

  Edgar slept, sometimes raving, sometimes lashing out with his left arm, scattering paint, glue, tape - things long forgotten, perhaps for road crews or used by the men who attacked weeds along the roadside with industrial-sized strimmers.

  Edgar swore at Francis, even George, with the hardest, cruellest words he could find. He heard the words that tumbled from him and hated them, someplace deep that he couldn't reach; calm and peace a deep, clear pool lost under a cover of oil and scum.

  His infection raged. He sweated and smelled rot in his ruined arm. Sometimes Francis was there when he woke. George, always.

  His respites were few, though.

  But hospitals were things of the dying world. Will was all they had.

  *

  While Edgar raved and burned inside George reached out and took away the worst.

  He hurt, but Francis was right. He didn't complain because he was muted, and paralysed. But he did hurt.

  He had something else to pull him through, though.

  Wait, George. Wait. It will get better.

  That voice was older, and the voice that always seemed to know what was true and what was not - the voice wiser than George's eight years by far.

  Those older thoughts knew that Francis would always hobble, and Edgar's right arm would end as a dead lump that hung from his side and that George himself would be just fine. Francis and Edgar were mortal.

  What was he? Something more than human...or less, or a short sideways step from a twisting ladder?

  None of them knew.

  Telepathy, regeneration, precognition.

  'If one thing can be true,' Francis asked on one of those long, slow nights, shortly before they left their own small bunker, 'why do the other things have to be a lie?'

  If one remarkable thing were true, could others be equally possible?

  Edgar thought they could.

  *

  Francis tried to find some kind of feeling, to cry, even, when the rain came, heavy with the ash of d
istance cities.

  She couldn't.

  Instead, she concerned herself with survival.

  'We're going to have to move on,' she said. George watched her and Edgar (brighter, if only a little) and listened. Francis moved easier with the aid of a pair of crutches she'd found nearly a mile away. The truth she understood, if they did not, was that without the crutches she might not have made it back. Luck was the only thing keeping them alive right now.

  Maybe George's will, too, she thought. But that couldn't feed them.

  'I'm going further and further each day. While I'm sure the exercise is good and all that - if I have to fight? If I have to run? I can't. That's as simple as it gets. I could probably go a couple of miles. I could maybe take a car. But if I do get in trouble...if I don't get back?'

  George and Edgar could see the truth of it. Without Francis, they were done.

  And the truth of her situation was different now. It took a while for her to recognise it, even after all the time she'd spent with George, and now Edgar.

  They were her responsibility.

  She was the parent she'd never wanted to be, and if her children could not run...neither could she. The underpass was simple, perhaps dull, and human minds sometimes relish simplicity and a well-earned break from care and concern.

  But respite ends.

  'You're right,' said Edgar. George managed the smallest of nods.

  *

  XI.

  Passing On

  Edgar sat beneath the underpass while dirty rain fell either side - like they were inside a charmless, manmade waterfall. Cold, too. Near November now, but no one had a watch or calendar. The weather wasn't a good indicator of season any more. It would be a long time before they might just the time of year by the weather.

  George was inside, away from the chill. Edgar was there because when she brought back the car she'd found a few days ago (if it would start, even, after nearly a month idle) she'd need his eyes, and his ears, and his one good arm. She supposed she would have driven the white van full of blood, if she had too. The concrete beneath the bonnet was black with grease or oil, though. It wouldn't start, and she wasn't upset about it.

  The rain was hard and nearly black and certainly poison...but it hid her from those who roamed; those lost in the dead days.

  'Are you ready?' Edgar asked.

  She patted his good arm - once dislocated and still sore and weak, but connected by nerve and tendon at least.

  'Close enough.'

  She put her hand on the cold concrete and began to push up.

  'Wait,' he said.

  'If I don't go now...'

  'I know. But wait.'

  'Edgar?'

  He looked away for a second, like he was trying to tidy his words before he let them out.

  'Francis...when I touched you, that first time,' Edgar said, 'I felt him. Like you and George are connected? I worry O'Dell can see us through you.'

  'That's an easy one,' she said, and rose. He was on a slight slope, higher, and now they faced. 'He can't,' said Francis. 'George holds him at bay. Sure, we don't know what O'Dell can do. But then we don't know what George can do - and George is just getting started.'

  'Okay...but O'Dell...'

  'Edgar, you think this is about bombs and poison in the water? It's not. It's not unimportant...but Edgar, the world is going to end - maybe it already has. And there is nothing we can do.'

  'Then what's the point? Why?'

  'O'Dell's already won. Do you see what I'm saying? The world's lost. Something will survive. But we were never going to win. But the world isn't the battleground. It's not the battleground. The battle isn't for buildings and land and shopping precincts, isn't it? And you and I? We're not fighting. He is,' she said.

  She meant George, of course. 'It's us, Edgar. O'Dell didn't die in the madness, or the fire. He's still alive, and we have to fight...and it's us against him - but you and I, even George, we're not the soldiers. We're the battlefield.'

  'If that's it, Francis...how are we going to protect him?'

  She took Edgar's hand. 'We're not, not now, or later. George is protecting us. The kid, O'Dell...they're fighting for what's left and O'Dell doesn't know it yet.'

  She walked into the hard rain, and away, toward a car she prayed would start. Edgar watched her until the rain swallowed her.

  *

  The car was two miles distant.

  Francis' limped through the rain. The best she had was a jean jacket she'd found - some woman's jean jacket, short and nearly useless. It grew heavy and barely kept the cold out. Maybe it cut down some of the wind that seemed to grow stronger day by day. The weather, the temperature, the wind, the dark rain...everything was miserable.

  And even though it should be daylight, it was dark. In the dark, she knew, people like her roamed and took what they wanted. Some were just like her. They wanted medicine and shelter, warmth and food.

  Some took the other things they wanted - people.

  Each step she took she glanced, her eyes wide and full of rain. Sight was next to useless anyway, hearing not much better. Senses she didn't know she had came into play. Thoughts she wished away. There, behind a car...was that a shadow, a shift, a tiny movement?

  Or was it just the rain drumming of roofs and bonnets?

  Can I fight on crutches?

  If it came to it, she would.

  She'd found the man who screamed. She'd seen what men (and women) could do. Not just crazed cannibals with filed teeth and long saws, not only grinning old men who wore suits and destroyed the world. But the small people, too. Nobodies. People with murder or torture in mind, or rape and mutilation or flesh ornaments for their bloodied homes. Gangs would roam, she imagined. People would follow those stronger than themselves, perhaps, and violence would become a badge, thigh bones topped with skulls sceptres in the new world.

  Stop it.

  Each step dark, every sound possible death.

  The walk was slow, the rain full of fear, and when she found the car, and it started, she wept.

  She thought it was the longest walk of her life, the most miserable she'd ever felt, the hardest thing she'd ever done.

  It wasn't.

  Her life was once shoes and good meals and credit cards. In the dead days, she found you had to earn what you needed, and pay for things you bought in different ways. She learned that in the next town.

  *

  When she pulled up in front of the white van, pointing to the north, Edgar's smile was almost worth the fear.

  She wound down the window. 'Hey handsome, how much to go round the world?'

  Edgar, to his credit, did laugh. She thought it might have been the first time she'd heard anything but questions and complaints.

  Maybe hope for him yet, she thought. Maybe for me, too.

  'Where to?' said Francis when Edgar was beside her and they'd got George in the back and the wheelchair in the boot.

  'Does it matter?' replied Edgar.

  It didn't.

  The car was a Cherokee Jeep, or a Jeep Cherokee. Francis wasn't sure and didn't care. Not as large as a Range Rover, but sure on the muck and mud that covered every road. They found a town just five miles down the road.

  Fire and violence and madness left its mark.

  Heads adorned the street. Not on pikes, like might have been done in some medieval war, but arranged neatly in rows along the streets.

  Rows of buildings burned or smashed, cars stuck down with rubber, debris from street battles, too - what looked like bullet holes, here and there, as though the military or police, perhaps, had been involved at some point.

  No people, just their heads.

  They drove on, through the littered streets, looking for a way out. Further out, there were no heads lining the dark streets. The silent stares of all those dead eyes was heavy, and when they were gone Francis at least felt lighter.

  Further still, near the place where the town seemed to turn to road again, was a small, one row car p
ark that served a pharmacy. Here, it seemed quiet. Less oppressive. After town, it looked like an oasis.

  Medicine, bandages...painkillers.

  Not an oasis...it might be heaven.

  'Don't stop,' said Edgar. 'Don't.'

  'We need to. Anything is better than nothing. Edgar...you need medicine. We need supplies...we might not get another chance.'

  'Don't,' he said. 'It's too...'

  But she pulled in.

  'Get in the driver's seat,' she told Edgar. 'Keep the engine running.'

  'I can't drive one-handed,' said Edgar.

  'I can't whistle, either. But if you hear me scream, drive. Understand?'

  'Francis, you don't have to.'

  'I don't, do I?' she said, but opened the door, took her crutches and made her way through the rain to the pharmacy.

  *

  It was almost heaven. Close as she imagined she was getting. A hot bath, a warm, soft bed, chocolate, a book...

  These things were mostly gone.

  But the shelves were nearly full, and there was a basket.

  She laughed, actually laughed, a hearty, belly laugh. She didn't hear the wet words until she stopped.

  'Please.'

  All her joy dried up in her throat.

  A trick?

  Someone hurt?

  Her only weapons were her crutches. If she tried to hit someone with those, she'd just fall on her arse.

  'Pleaseeee.'

  Whoever spoke was hidden behind the chemist's counter. The till, the rows of dextrose sweets and cough candies like Fisherman's Friends. Bottles of pink medicine for acid guts...the simple stuff in a line.

  The good stuff - codeine, morphine, penicillin, amoxicillin - over there where the owner of the voice hid.

  In pain, or waiting?

  'Please.'