by Paul Kane
CHAPTER FIVE
Record:
Been a week or so since my last entry, and the other night I listened to the previous couple – as I tend to do, picking up the thread again. But my Lord, what state of mind must I have been in when I signed off…? All that poetic crap about death and destruction, like they were people. They’re not. They’re just a way of… I was going to say way of life, but there’s very little about the world around me that’s living any more. Existing, maybe; no more than that. Going backwards, definitely.
It’s been a week, because not only did I want to put in a good bit of travelling in during that time, I also couldn’t face telling any more of the story. Got me down to be honest… Ha – got me down… What exactly gets me up these days? And I mean that literally, in that I find it a real struggle to get myself moving and on the road again in the mornings.
But anyway, my problem – and I do need to carry on with this. It might even help get things straight in my head; might help me figure out the ‘why’ of it all. Move on, as I’ve said, not just physically but mentally as well. So, here we go again. I’ve found an isolated spot, with good visibility in every direction; it’ll do until I’ve finished with the next leg of the journal anyway.
We’d got to the bridge, hadn’t we; the escape from that town. I managed to put a fair few miles between me and that shit-hole before the car started to splutter, then eventually break down. Wasn’t fuel – because again, like the chopper, according to the gauge I had almost a full tank – so it must have been wear and tear. Couldn’t really blame it, I suppose – I’d put it through its paces back there. Still, it would leave me stranded out in the middle of nowhere once more. Not a bad situation given the alternative, of being back in an urban environment with potential killers around every turn, but I wondered if I could get that moving and on the road again. My little joke…
Now, I don’t know much beyond the basics of engines. I can drive, I can fly, but what keeps those machines ticking is very much beyond me. Used to watch the engineers back in my Air Force days, flitting about, seeing to the maintenance of those planes and helicopters. They were like magicians, some of them, could make each part do wonders… Or like conductors in an orchestra, encouraging each section to work and make the whole thing produce the sweetest of music. And there we were, abusing their darlings – treating them so badly. Bit like in real life, I suppose; the aircraft even had female names.
Point is, I would have given anything for someone on that deserted road who knew one end of a carburettor from the other. Wasn’t as if I could just get the AA on the phone to come out and give me a tow – more’s the pity. The AA had probably by now killed one other or screwed themselves senseless. I had to face the fact that I was on my own, and if I was to fix the Ford I was going to have to learn on the job. Might just be something as simple as a fan belt, in which case I could probably find something to replace it with… but where was a good old-fashioned stocking when you needed one?
I popped the bonnet and climbed out to take a look. Lifting it and securing it, I took a gander at the engine itself – and immediately saw what the problem was. In spite of how new the paintwork on the car appeared, what was keeping it running – or not, as the case turned out to be – was dotted with rust. A kind of rust, at any rate – coppery in colour, flaky and patchy, it reminded me a little of the mould at some of the hostels I’d stayed in during my adventures abroad. I reached out and prodded a piece that was coating the motor. My fingers brushed it and I watched as it crumbled under my touch – leaving a small hole in the casing. I might not have known that much about engines, but I knew I wasn’t going to be fixing this one in a hurry; I was lucky it had got me off that bridge, let alone this far.
Except now that I stepped away from under the bonnet, I saw patches on the car’s side of that same stuff – originating from the tyre well. There were a few more spots towards the back on the flank as well. I stood there and frowned. Everything had happened in a bit of a rush, especially after the affected began congregating to chase after me – that kind of mass panic mode Carrie had talked about in the cellar – but I could have sworn the rust hadn’t been there when we set off. I’d chosen the car specifically because it looked like it would get me away from town; as fast as possible, in fact – that and it happened to start, of course. So what…?
Something began to spark in my mind: a recollection. But I didn’t have time to think about it, to piece things together – not at that time.
Largely because of the birds…
I heard the things before I even saw them, though Christ knows how; there were so many. You just get used to birdsong, tune it out, but the racket they were making was something else. All weirdly out of tune; squawking more than singing. Some sounded as if they were in pain, others like they were laughing – and there were so many of the buggers when I looked up. They were like a big black cloud in the sky, but moving too quickly; not taking their time like clouds drifting across the horizon. The closer they came, the more I could see that they were made up of different types and sizes – birds who would never normally flock together at all: blackbirds with sparrows; pigeons and starlings… The way they were flying was erratic, too. Some were striking each other in mid-air, knocking their neighbours out of the way, or pecking at them.
Then they banked. It wasn’t fluid, wasn’t like those displays the Red Arrows used to put on that Dad would take me to see – fuelling my interest in all things aircraft-related – but clumsy and haphazard, like trying to turn a horse-drawn cart too quickly. I watched all this, puzzled, then realised the banking was growing steeper – that the flock was heading in my direction. It still took me a few moments to shake myself out of my stupor – part of me wanting to carry on observing, another part screaming that I needed to get the hell out of there right now!
By the time I’d started moving, the birds were already dive-bombing. Some crashed into the ground not far from me, some struck the car – just as I was ducking down to use it as a shield. They hit the vehicle with such force it was like shells punching into it, smashing glass and metal alike. Several flew straight down into the roof, then through it on impact. Down they plummeted, but they also began to fly around me, circling the car to peck, to stab at me. The combination of my clothes and the SKIN protected me from the worst of it, but there were just so many to fight off. I managed to get the car door open, slide across and grab the rifle and my bag. I laid down a spray of bullets – but when I got out of the car and stood upright, I just waved the weapon back and forth like a mad woman with a broom, batting at cobwebs.
Hitchcock had nothing on these bastards, I tell you. They didn’t care whether they lived or died – as the Kamikaze ones still raining down proved. All they wanted was to attack me, to cause as much havoc as they possibly could. Through the flurry of wings and beaks, I spotted a wood in the distance. They’d follow me, no doubt, but if I made it to the trees I’d at least have more cover than I had standing there.
So, shouldering the backpack and gun, I put up my arms as a barrier and ran. I ploughed through them, just as I had with the affected and the car in town. But I soon realised that these poor creatures were just as messed up as the humans back where I’d come from, just as corrupted by whatever it was that had done this.
Visibility was worse than it had been when that guy had landed on my windscreen, or when the dust cloud was chasing me to the bridge. Only this time I felt more exposed, if that makes sense, regardless of the fact I still had some protection – I was enclosed inside a different kind of bubble, not of metal but of the SKIN’s making. That run seemed to take forever, with birds crashing into me from behind, from in front and above. It would only have taken one to drop dead centre on me, and I’d have been done – but I kept on moving, heading forwards, heading onwards. Until I finally reached the treeline.
I almost ran slap-bang into the trunk of one tree, in fact – only at the last moment diving sideways and letting my feathered ‘friend
s’ have that privilege. The further into the wood I went, the less the birds followed me. Then, at last, when it felt like I was never going to be rid of them, or would run out of trees in the process, they were gone – almost as suddenly as they’d appeared in the first place.
Leaning back against a trunk, I slumped down and got my breath back. I couldn’t even assume I was safe out here in the countryside now; absolutely anything could turn against me. And I saw that again when I came out of the woods, spotting a couple of cows in a nearby field that were butting heads in a fight to the death. I couldn’t help thinking of that disease in the late twentieth century, how people had been so scared of meat from ‘mad’ cows in case it infected them. These were the real deal, and it made me wonder if perhaps all this had happened because of contaminated food or drink instead of being carried in the air? Or maybe it had mutated from that? It was pointless to speculate, but I wanted – needed – answers, and I wasn’t about to get them out there.
As I trudged away from the trees, avoiding insane livestock, I kept turning to look up at the sky in case those birds found me again and I needed to break for more cover. Didn’t happen, though, and it wasn’t long before I saw a farm in the distance – probably the one that the cows belonged to. I headed off that way, figuring it was worth checking out. Maybe I’d find more people who hadn’t been plagued by the psychosis, but mostly it was because the sky was darkening, about to rain, and I wanted somewhere to shelter – silly really, because I couldn’t even get wet; but then a lot of mental hang-ups were still left from before the time I put on the SKIN. Still are.
The property looked deserted – perhaps it had been before all this, because I saw it was quite run down the nearer I got. Falling down might have been a more accurate description, especially for the outhouses and barns, and I had a flashback to those buildings in town that had toppled because of the craters, because of the cracks in the road. We don’t get earthquakes much in this country; extremely rare. And never ones which do that kind of damage. Was it just a coincidence it had happened around the same time as the madness, or something more? My mind was still racing; I needed to rest.
The farmhouse itself looked like the best bet out of the lot; built from stone, it appeared stable enough. The door was open, so I went inside – gun raised in case of trouble. I moved through the kitchen, through the hall, then into the living room – where I found an old man sitting in a chair. Damn, he looked so much like Dad, that guy. Even more so because he’d clearly died there and no-one had come looking. No bottles of milk for the neighbours to see; no neighbours for miles, come to that. He’d just passed away and was rotting, skin grey and mottled, head back and his mouth wide.
In his lap, open at the page he’d been reading, was a Bible – and as I looked around the room, wrenching my eyes away from him, I saw there were various crosses and framed religious passages. I returned my gaze to the corpse, taking a step or two. But I didn’t want to see the sections he’d been reading in that book, because of what I feared they might be; didn’t want to look upstairs – not just because the steps seemed as rickety as all hell, but because I was frightened of seeing something… someone in the bed. Maybe a wizened old woman, his wife. Not saying that makes any sense – and I probably should have made sure there were no nasty surprises – but it did to me at the time. So I simply sat down opposite the man and continued to stare at him.
As I did that, suddenly things started to take shape. I remembered what I’d seen when that woman had pressed her face up against the driver’s side window. Something spreading up her neck, across her face – like the rust on the car, but slightly different: dead skin, like that of the man’s in front of me. No, not just dead… decaying. The same was true of those birds on the ground, I now recalled. Some of them bald in places – which could have been due to the hard landing, yet something told me it wasn’t. Flashes of things in my head, connections being made. This man, my father, the woman’s face… The birds, the crazy people, Mum… The buildings outside that were in such a state of disrepair, and those falling buildings again… The hole in the motor, the holes in the road… flaking, cracking.
And then, I guess you could say I had a revelation. I knew what was happening, even if I didn’t know the reason for it. Everything – like this man, whether he’d died of natural causes or not; like my Dad had been after he’d taken his own life – was rotting away. The craziness that had been caused back in the facility, back in that town, had happened because the rot had somehow wormed its way into people’s brains – affecting them in the same way that terrible disease had affected my mother and so many others I’d witnessed when she’d been taken in. Maybe it had crept up the back, into the brain-stem – something that wasn’t visible straight away, something you had to look for specifically. It would explain the different kinds of behaviour anyway… and did you know – I certainly didn’t until I found out later on – that a bird’s brain and a human brain have similar wiring?
And brains, like machines – like a car or helicopter engine, or even a gun – only have to have one faulty, one malfunctioning part for the whole thing to go to pot. But it hadn’t just got into people, into machinery this… this Rot. It had got into the roads, buildings. Organic, non-organic. As incredible as it sounded, it was fucking up everything around us. I couldn’t prove any of this at that time, of course – for that I would need to do some research, maybe find books that could help, do some tests, but it all made sense to me. For the first time since I’d heard the alarms, that gunfire back at the facility, it all made perfect sense!
I don’t know at what point after I’d been thinking all this I dropped to sleep, but it was like my body needed to recharge, and now I’d reached this conclusion it could power down for a while. I remember dreaming about clouds again, about flying. No cats woke me up this time, however, I just opened my eyes when the sun came flooding in through the window, finding us in that living room. It had the capacity to make anything look beautiful, that light – another thing we all took for granted, every day – even that dead farmer, who looked so peaceful in his chair. I hoped then he’d gone before all this took hold, before the Rot did something to his brain; to his land. Probably hadn’t… but it did tell me one thing: that this fucking disease didn’t re-animate the dead. No people rising out of their graves to eat you in this apocalypse, thank fuck. So, you will never hear me say the ‘Z–word’, no matter what state these people find themselves in. Just doesn’t describe them. Dying, putrefying, but not dead.
I thought about burying him, saying a few words, but it seemed cruel to move him. This was his home, probably had been forever, and it felt right to cremate him inside it. Felt also like the fire would be doing something good this time, something cleansing instead of killing people as it had done at the facility; in the cellar. Out the back, I found a couple of tractors that didn’t look like they’d been used in an age – although in this new climate, how could you tell? – but I also found cans, some of which still had diesel inside. I spent the next twenty minutes or so pouring it onto stuff inside, starting with the old man, and then I dug out some matches from the kitchen.
As I walked away from that farm, leaving it burning up, I said a quick prayer for the man who had looked so much like my father – or like he would have looked before the undertakers cleaned him up. Wondered if there really had been a wife upstairs in the bedroom.
Wondered what I would find when I reached the next town or city.
Stop.
CHAPTER SIX
Record:
Once I knew about it, once I knew what to look for – instead of my eyes sliding off it; my mind filtering it out – I saw it everywhere on my journey. For example, I came across a lake covered in patches of what I thought was algae. Not all that unusual, you might think, but there was just something about this particular stuff. Wasn’t green for a start, it was a kind of purple-grey colour. I found a stick and poked at one of the denser bits, which wrapped itself around the wood.
Sure enough, when I brought it out again, it was already starting to be eaten away, like I’d just dipped it in acid. I knew the SKIN would probably protect me even from this, but I wasn’t willing to put it to the test until I had no choice. Instead, I threw a stone into the centre of the lake, urging the water, the ripples, to tear into that Rot – to break it up. Did very little good; the infection was too strong and spreading all the time. But I had to believe there was a way to fix this, to fight it, to reverse it. That there was still hope.
I headed south, following my compass until I hit a main road and then a motorway. Sticking to hills which ran parallel to the long road, some of which were covered with grass that was turning brown – dying or already dead – I saw cars that had been either abandoned or their drivers had crashed them. Thought about going down and seeing if any would start, but it was too much hassle. The affected were flitting between them; some even crawling over lorries or coaches, as I hunkered down on the hillside and watched them through my binoculars. Each person, and every vehicle down there, was in a different stage of the Rot. With some figures it had accelerated, now covering half their faces, eating away the flesh in parts – so that I could see teeth and tongues through their cheeks. With others it was only noticeable if you looked really hard; tiny islands of Rot at the hairline – which wasn’t to say it hadn’t covered other parts of their bodies, beneath whatever clothing they had on. It at least backed up the idea that the virus spread at different speeds in different cases.
I saw more cracks in the roads as well, holes ranging in size from the crater-like one I’d seen before to some as small as hubcaps. The closer I came to the city this road was guiding me to, the more I could see how the virus had devastated the buildings. There was an office block, for instance, which had Rot climbing up the side like ivy up a cottage; here and there its insides had been exposed, displaying rooms with desks and chairs rather than organs and muscles – but the effect was the same.
